Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  I leapt off the bed, my trousers slipped down around my ankles and the knife landed on the floor. “Imagine, I slept in the same bed as someone who carries a knife,” he said, exhilarated. At least I got to try the pool before I left. A little later when I stood by the road I realized that I was only twenty kilometres from Torremolinos. And the first person I met when I arrived in town was Tim. I had been gone for exactly one week. He had been beside himself with worry and for that reason he was gentle as a lamb for a long time.’

  ‘So did you ever get out of there?’

  ‘Yes, but then I went back again.’

  Charles looks expectant, and a little disappointed. But I am not Scheherazade. I just enjoyed being on my own that week, that something happened, that I managed on my own.

  ‘Here is a slice of autumn,’ I said to Charles later that day, and handed him a red leaf. He stuck it in the pot with the paradise tree to support it. Yes, then it could be a fig leaf, in the Christian section. The sky reveals how cold it has become. The sunset looks like a piece of architecture, the purple and red colours appear to have been forged. And Charles’s body is in ruins, ‘I’m split down the middle,’ he says, ‘I don’t know how I’m ever going to get out of here.’

  ‘Here’ meaning the bed. I am used to ‘here’ meaning the world. I hear the elderly members of my family say: ‘I long to get out of here,’ meaning they want to escape this world. For that reason a brief clash occurs within me when Charles uses that turn of phrase.

  Charles’s body is only in ruins internally. On the outside there is nothing to see. Just before, a moment ago, he called me from the bathroom: ‘Come and look at me.’

  I wanted to look at him. Most of the time he is under the duvet.

  ‘Look, I look like myself,’ he said, ‘don’t I look like myself?’

  I went over to him, into the shower, through the water in my stocking feet. I delicately embraced him then stepped back and looked at him again, and here it ends, in the shower, as my cheeks get wet – all the time that has passed, such a huge part of our lives, without being able to open the folding doors of our bodies and enter one another.

  A THEATRE OF SOULS or THE ENTIRE PARTY

  [Camilla, Alma, Alwilda, Edward, Charles and Kristian] ‘Oh, I wish that today the world would present its best side, now that Charles is finally going out into it. The world is a large tray that I hold out to him. The world is my invention. For a long time I have brought objects from it into the living room for him, a red leaf, a black feather. And then there is the tree. And there perches the bird,’ Camilla says.

  ‘The eggs are too big,’ Edward says, cupping his balls in his hand (his temperature was nearing forty-one degrees, he was delirious), ‘they have to be trimmed / with a cheese slicer.’

  ‘I am drowning in the night. I am trying to find good things to get me through the despairing hours between one and five,’ Camilla says, ‘my soul feels hard and full of bumps, like a runway that is impossible to land on. So I am circling above myself. I can’t descent and take hold.’

  ‘Promise me that if I die, Camilla will not get the dog.’

  ‘I walked today. I sucked in my upper abdomen, as I was taught, to engage my inner corset,’ Charles says.

  ‘Today Charles and I walked down the street together, for the first time in an entire year, I had thought he would walk hunched over, like an old man. But he was straight as a tin soldier,’ Camilla says.

  ‘No, that was no geriatric patrol,’ Alma says, ‘I saw the two of you arrive.’

  ‘The scar on his back from the operation – doesn’t it look like a piece of laced-up pork?’ Alma asks.

  ‘Not at all. It looks like a ladder.’

  ‘Death, I don’t give it a second thought,’ says Charles.

  ‘But you wear your heart on your sleeve.’

  ‘Nor do I,’ Alwilda says to Charles.

  ‘And I held my head high,’ says Charles.

  ‘I’m not walking towards the red trees – they’re the ones that move. They move forward and into me like peacekeepers,’ Camilla says.

  ‘From the glossary of therapists, the word I am most tired of is “accommodate” – two people standing opposite one another and screaming: accommodate me, accommodate me,’ Edward says.

  ‘You’re forgetting about society,’ Alwilda says, ‘you’re only thinking of yourselves.’

  ‘I always buy a magazine from the homeless,’ Kristian says.

  ‘Nor in all decency can you do otherwise. When you come out of the department store barely able to carry all of your merchandise.’

  ‘Couldn’t we juuust squeeze the magazine in between two delicacies.’

  ‘No, there’s no bloody room for that today/then the bag will break.’

  ‘Feel free to pick up anything I drop, it’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m dreaming,’ says Edward, ‘there’s a husband and wife and a black Labrador. The woman looks at the Labrador, she says: I love you, and the dog’s face bursts into joy, it leaps up and kisses her. Now the exact same thing is repeated, between the Labrador and the man.’

  ‘How symmetrical,’ Alwilda says, ‘but I want to go to China, I want to eat an eight-metre-long noodle, anyone care to join me?’

  ‘I’d rather go to Iraq,’ Kristian says, ‘I want to tempt fate. No, I want to travel through Afghanistan on the back of a donkey. Since our time here is so brief.’

  ‘May I suggest a camel,’ Alwilda says, ‘and then I’ll join you.’

  ‘Cut the heel and chop the toe, then into marriage you can go,’ Alma says.

  ‘When I have a child,’ Alwilda says, ‘I’ll chase it up a tall tree every day.’

  ‘You should have been alive back when time was one great mass and not chopped up into tiny little tickets, for example, 3 p.m., 4 September 2007,’ Kristian says, ‘I’m talking about the Stone Age, I think.’

  ‘Then your time here would have been even shorter.’

  ‘Afghanistan, go to Afghanistan, that’s the closest you’ll get to the Stone Age.’

  ‘I know what Kristian’s final words will be.’

  ‘So do I. Da capo, he’ll say.’

  ‘Da capo, he’ll rattle.’

  ‘We stick together like lyme grass.’

  ‘But none of you like me.’

  ‘I like you, Kristian.’

  ‘We’re pieces on a board game. In the end we’ll all have stood on all the squares.’

  ‘Let’s take off our clothes and play Twister.’

  ‘Who’s going to disentangle us afterwards?’

  ‘Kristian. He won’t want to take part anyway.’

  ‘I’m scared you’ll accidentally push me,’ says Charles, ‘then I’ll be split down the middle again.’

  ‘You’re wrong about that. Kristian is happy to take off his clothes.’

  ‘O, hast thou a dog then heap ye praise on it,’ Edward says.

  ‘When you smile, it’s like you’re all teeth, Camilla,’ Edward says.

  ‘To fall asleep and wake up as easily as an animal.’

  ‘I feel like a broiler hen on a hook, that accidentally …’ Charles stops short.

  ‘Good morning, here’s today’s roll of tickets.’

  ‘What do I do when the last leaf has fallen? When there’s no more yellow or red remaining,’ Camilla says.

  ‘Five fruit flies flew through three fields, thirsty for free flower meals,’ sings Edward.

  ‘Then you just have to chug through all the withered leaves,’ Alwilda says, ‘it helps to shout Choo-choo.’

  ‘What do we do with nature / it must teach us how to die.’

  ‘Let’s split up into two teams. Then we’ll sing it in rounds. Wouldn’t it sound almost Gregorian? The first line in treble, and the next in bass.’

  ‘You can’t sing. You know nothing of notes. To you, there is only high and low,’ Kristian says.

  ‘But I have a good sense of rhythm,’ Alma says.

  ‘I’ve b
een lying in bed for such a long time. The world passes like an express train. And I’m standing completely still,’ says Charles.

  ‘Do you want to hear what I’m dreaming about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m standing on an oil platform, far out at sea. I’m fishing. I’ve got a turtle on the hook. It’s moving at a furious pace. Now I’m getting on a bus in order to catch it.’

  ‘Edward, oh Edward, here’s another blanket, you’re shaking with fever.’

  ‘Yes, the body is a fantastic factory.’

  ‘Men like us need old-fashioned womanly care.’

  ‘You’re not feeding the dog chocolate, are you, Camilla?’

  ‘It’s my pleasure, I used to tie my grandfather’s shoelaces all the time. But when I’m lying here, I can see how dusty it is,’ Alwilda says.

  ‘I can’t manage everything,’ Camilla says.

  ‘I went to see a psychologist,’ Edward says, ‘because of all the loss I suffered, but it seemed immodest to air my thoughts to a complete stranger.’

  ‘Tighter,’ says Charles, and wriggles his foot.

  RELOCATIONS

  [Camilla]

  I have two thoughts in the same breath, so to speak; the first, how often my mum moves house, and the second, about a scene at a bar near Death Valley.

  My mum had moved again, she had bought a small yellow house on Orevej in Vordingborg, where she worked, I had travelled there to visit her and stood out in the garden whitewashing a wall in a muted yellow tone, my mum might have been gardening near me, or maybe she came up to me, in any case she said that she considered her stay in this house a temporary one, and that she would probably sell it on soon; I was infuriated and put the brush down, because working on the wall seemed pointless now. Why waste my energy on this place if she was only thinking of getting rid of it, and how many times had I already helped her move? A pylon rested its one heavy leg in the back garden, and her life in the house was accompanied by an unpleasant crackling; in itself reason enough to move, but of course she had seen the pylon when she had made up her mind to buy, so why had she even bought the house? The answer was, to quickly get away from where she lived, a so-called temporary solution, and moreover the garden was long, like her grandmother’s garden had been, long – it had stirred up memories of afternoons under fruit trees, with a book, at the end of the garden, alone, free from meddling, free from human companionship, with a purring cat on the blanket with her. A paradise where you only had to raise your hand to pick a sweet-smelling apple, a yellowish pear, where the fruits let go of the branch on their own accord and dropped onto the blanket for you. But towering at the end of this garden was the pylon; and then towering behind the pylon was the sea, practically lapping at the other leg of the pylon where it rested on the shore. At night we went swimming, or perhaps it was only one night, when a childhood friend of my mum’s had popped by, unannounced, and I had produced an exceptionally successful dinner of fried plaice, golden-brown and crisp all over, and said something bizarre to him, he was a botanist, that I did not realize that hyacinth grew wild, I thought it was a cultivated plant, a child of the greenhouse so to speak, and it had evoked great surprise in him, it almost looked as though he had smelt something foul when I had the misfortune to say that, god knows how we ended up talking about hyacinths, in the middle of the summer? (For me that flower, still, is associated with Christmas.) In any case the three of us went for a long walk on the beach, after dinner, and my mum and I went swimming while he sat in the sand with his arms crossed. He had flirted with her for years when they were young, now I felt his gaze on me as I sunk into the waves and emerged from them again, wearing my orange swimsuit; my mum must have been fifty, and I was composed of long, taut muscles.

  Prior to that (buying the small yellow house) she had lived in a large flat at the hospital where she worked in the old person psychiatry ward, the patients she called her ‘geriatrics’. There was a nasty consultant psychiatrist who made life miserable for her, as well as for the geriatrics, and went hunting in Poland where he committed outright massacres, he brought home hundreds of bloody bodies, or maybe simply left them where they fell, in any case I had these monstrous figures passed on to me, boastfully recited over lunch, 119 ducks, 12 hares, and an equally astronomical number of wild geese, put to death by this man alone, in one weekend; it sounded like a distorted unabashed echo of Valdemar IV: ‘77 chickens and 77 geese is nothing,’ he is alleged to have said when he had the Goose Tower constructed in Vordingborg and placed the golden goose at the top of the tower to mock the 77 war declarations he had received from the Hanseatic towns. (At one time Alwilda had a boyfriend who was a hunter and came home and plonked bloody heaps on the kitchen counter, as a gift to her, ‘here you go – haven’t I been a clever boy,’ and suddenly the smitten vegetarian Alwilda found herself in a cloud of feathers that clung to her reddened hands. It was strange to watch her climb out of an oversized four-wheel-drive with two baying hounds at the very back throwing themselves against the grille. I did not much feel like seeing her during that period. But she said it was because he was well-off, and he always closed his eyes when he fired the gun, or whatever it’s called. He felt he was obliged to, to go hunting, his income required it, or his social class.)

  The flat was situated above some offices. It was newly renovated when she moved in and reeked of varnish, maybe the floors above and below her were also being renovated, because the stench of varnish seemed to linger everywhere. This glistening railing, the large slippery floors, made me think back to the corridors at Stege Hospital, where I lived for a year, before I started school, in a hospital flat, with my mum; she worked at the A&E, and my hypersensitivity to emergency vehicles stems from this time, since the sound of an ambulance usually meant that she had to grab her white coat and run, and I was left in the care of a young girl who preferred giggling with her girlfriend over having anything to do with me. Of the accidents (at the A&E) I only remember a young boy who had worked as a beater, but had been mistaken for game and came in filled with shotgun pellets, which my mum picked out, with tweezers I presume, and I imagined a hail of small metal pieces drumming against the bottom of a metal bowl; I used to slide down the corridors in stockinged feet shouting and at full speed until I was reprimanded by a lady in a blue coat, wherever she came from, probably from somewhere in the kitchen. My mum’s coats were starched, and I could not get enough of the breast pocket where a couple of pens were fastened, and a pair of forceps, it was unusual having a pocket with the contents hanging on the outside. One day around lunchtime my immature red cat (separated from its mother too early; and here it could be claimed that if you do not get enough mum time, you apparently remain a child; in any case the cat spent the rest of its days waiting for a sleeping person to have the misfortune to poke a toe out from under the duvet or setting up an ambush behind doors and leaping out at passers-by, until it died tragically – it got too close to a farmer who had been out catching eels and was cleaning them, and the farmer poked a pitchfork into its abdomen, and the cat came home with its intestines dangling behind it) – jumped out the window of our second floor flat, just jumped. It landed in front of the mental patients, who walked in a long chugging row, like they were linked together, carrying or pushing trolleys that resembled milk cans, which I suspect were filled with scalding hot soup, a heavy yellow liquid. The cat falling from the sky made them stop for a moment. They were wearing identical greyish-brown coats and trousers, the mental patients wore uniforms. I saw it all from the window. I waited to fetch the cat until they had disappeared down a basement staircase and were inside the building.

  On the grounds, a strangely straightforward word, which my mum always uses about the area around a hospital, which for her is connected with a feeling of freedom and rest when she moves across it, on the way from one ward to another (her sense of direction is not well developed, she always chooses the grounds over the shorter route through the hospital’s underground system of corridors, if
there is such a thing), on the grounds around Oringe you could meet a long-term Greenlandic patient who had eaten his enemy’s heart, or maybe only part of it, a titbit I learnt by overhearing a conversation, inadvertently. In one of the wards foundered a number of Faeroese patients, hospitalised twenty-thirty-forty years earlier, at a time when there was no possibility of receiving psychiatric treatment on the Faroe Islands, brutally torn from family and everything familiar, and placed here, for something approaching eternity. There had been a few instances of arson at the hospital, which had frightened my mum and been a contributing factor to her buying the small yellow house. To further underscore the ‘fire theme’… after giving notice to terminate the lease, she had been paid a visit by a close friend who emptied the ashtray in the wastepaper basket and caused yet another fire, but this one was able to be extinguished under the tap. She moved out of the fire into the electricity, from crackling to crackling. And there were mice. One night she was awoken by a mouse crawling across her face. Where was the cat? She had taken on a cat from the previous owner of the house; agreeing to take the cat into the bargain (otherwise it would be put down), ‘it jumped up on my shoulder and wrapped itself around my neck like a fur collar,’ she told me, but its gratitude did not extend to keeping out the mice: and a mouse got stuck behind the cooker and died there, we could not get the cooker to budge (as though riveted to the spot), so my mum poured a couple of bottles of vinegar into the gap between the wall and the cooker in the hope of easing the smell, and perhaps also to accelerate the process of decay, she explains the chemical process to me in the midst of her jostling, but the potent smell of Christmas (red cabbage and pork roast) rose up from the gap and made her want to move even more, she hates odours, and this was desperate. The house of the unfortunate animals, ignoring the cat ‘like a fur collar’ and so on… one morning there was a crash on the roof, and we raced out of the house, it was during one of my visits, and lying on the ground was a swan and a couple of roof tiles, it had crashed into the roof and had to be collected, hissing and bleeding, by a man from animal rescue wearing enormous leather gloves who placed a firm grip around the neck of the swan, right up by the head, ‘so the chap doesn’t bite,’ and there was, not surprisingly, something erotic about the long white muscle that lived a life of its own between the gloves.