Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Not until my mum got cancer was I able to tolerate seeing laboratory animals on TV, mice endowed with tumours so large that they could barely walk, yes, I observed them out of pure cool interest. On the other hand I had a proper breakdown, lasting an entire afternoon, when Charles and I were at a bar near Death Valley, sitting at the bar, or rather hanging over the bar, our straw hats duly dangling from strings down our backs, exhausted from the heat, next to a terrarium, on the bar counter, where an inconsequential grey gerbil sat in a landscape that was a miniature copy of the desert landscape outside, nibbling on a piece of straw it held ever so delicately in its mouse hands (I wish I could say that the straw quivered in its hands, because something ought to have quivered, the mouse for example, out of fear; but total calm prevailed; and I seem to remember hearing that when animals are unable to react to impending danger, flight or fight, they often start to eat, or groom their fur, evidently to calm themselves), strange to keep mice, I managed to think, before I spotted the snake. The snake, also grey, was coiled up, staring at the mouse, which did not seem to take notice of it, but it certainly would when the snake got hungry. To be confined with death like that brought to life every ounce of claustrophobia in my body, and I left the bar (after considering whether I should ask the bartender, didn’t he think there was enough evil in the world, did he need to throw a scenario like that into the bargain but I knew that I would be categorized as a sensitive, hysterical woman, that at most he would reply with a shrug), and let myself into our car, where I launched into a lengthy fit of sobbing, interrupted only by posing the same questions (to Charles), over and over again, as though he’d have an answer: ‘How could someone think of something so cruel?’ ‘Why not wait until the snake was hungry before putting the mouse inside?’ And when my mum got cancer, she had long since sold the small yellow house and said thank you and goodbye to the trigger-happy consultant psychiatrist and had (temporarily) moved in with me, it was a couple of years before Charles and I moved in together. When she had told me about the tumour, I slipped down on the floor and for a long time lay with my face pressed against the carpet and recalled what she had said one evening as we walked round the corner onto the road where the small yellow house was situated (I remember we had just turned, because what she said, in my mind was linked with the expression ‘to round a sharp corner’), devastated, exhausted, upset about the consultant again, out of breath from smoking far too many cigarettes, she said: ‘Yes, you slowly begin to realize what will put an end to you. As for me, it will probably be the heart or the lungs’; I had nodded in the dark, her voice was embittered, the words seemed completely abstract to me, because here she walked, alive and full of vigour, beside me (so vigorous and embittered that I dared not offer any objections), not the least bit ill – all the same I must have believed her since this tumour in her breast, cancer in a family that had never known cancer, gave me a feeling of being taken for a ride, cheated through and through, victim of the complete unpredictability of existence. When I could stand on my own two feet again, I went out to buy her a nice present, it was the only thing I could think of (after having repeated the family mantra, ‘it’s going to be alright,’ probably in an imploring tone, half a dozen times), and brought home, blind to the symbolic value at the time, a mother duck in turquoise and silver, with her ducklings standing in a row behind her, which she still keeps on her windowsill. Because she survived, but the cancer left her in a panicky state that gave wings to her desire to move, so to speak, and made her move house five times, relatively quickly, one after another. Clearly, she and I living together did not work, after many years of living independently, even though she did her best not to interfere in my life, and I in hers, I remember (with shame) how in anger, I plunged a knife into an orange, pierced the skin and twisted the knife around in the wound, which made her raise her arms in terror. She was ill, and I was strong and angry. She did not have the strength to move out, but I drove her to it. I found her a flat and moved and unpacked and arranged everything. Stepping inside the flat was a big moment. She went inside and walked over to a wall and slid down slowly until she reached the floor, wearing her coat and clutching her bag, exhausted, incapable of starting over, yet again. A little later we walked, through the rain, towards Kongens Nytorv, through her new neighbourhood, I was disappointed, she ought to have been delighted that I had taken such good care of her, but most of all she wanted to die. I had played doll’s house, but the doll did not want to, could not, was incapable, skin yellowed, ill. Since I had practically forced this place upon her, it was not that strange that she gave notice to terminate the lease soon after and moved out. Every time she moved, there was a good reason: first there was a motorcyclist who started his motorcycle in the courtyard every morning at five o’clock; then there was no lift in her block, and stairs would be so difficult to manage – in the future. I recalled how often she had rearranged the furniture when I was a child, and how little I enjoyed coming home to discover that stars and planets, while I had been at school, had formed new constellations, that arch enemies leaned against one another affectionately, that separations had occurred. Everything at floor level. I wound my way through the labyrinth, oh, there it is, but where is that, and how could you think of doing that, in my room, it looks like war; but the rearranging always wore her out to such an extent that I simply had to yield, give her a hand, so the finishing touches could be made, against my wishes. My steadfast mother’s hair was dripping from her exertions, and the floors so tremendously clean that you could eat off them, the rearranging always included spring cleaning. My mum was declared healthy just as Charles grew ill, she had reached her goal and passed the baton.

  When she was most afraid (the cancer had moved to her bones, though she did not know that yet) she began to send round her furniture with removal vans, I think of it as the frantic circle dance withered leaves perform when trapped in a corner, in the wind’s embrace. Some furniture she sent (to their surprise) to friends, some she sent to me, and other pieces still were driven out to her summerhouse. I remember how surprised I was one October day when Charles and I were going to weekend at the summerhouse, and there was the table we had eaten at the previous day, in her flat, and her bed was there, and other pieces of furniture that belonged in other places suddenly revealed themselves. But that bookcase! But those chairs! Here! The removal men had forgotten to close the door behind them, and nature had trespassed, there were leaves and twigs on the carpet. I was confused, to put it mildly. And I began to sweep the new backdrop. Fear of death, that was what it was, in its pure and simple form. In turn she had, simultaneously, from an acquaintance who collected antique furniture, received seventeen chairs, and a sofa that had reportedly belonged to Admiral Gjedde. It had collapsed, as though the centuries had taken its breath away. And I found my mum in her flat, on the floor, in a sleeping bag, surrounded by all the chairs, and the deflated sofa, quiet observers of the bronze light that suddenly surrounded her, because everything about her was now bronze, her skin, her hair. She was admitted to hospital, and it turned out that the Crab had teamed up with the bones.

  One sentence continues to haunt me: ‘Therefore no ruins may be seen from a flower passage.’ (I stumbled across it in an article about horticulture from 1802.)

  Have I conjured up flower passages in my story? Or are they pure ruins?

  And if I have successfully constructed a flower passage, have I then allowed a ruin to be seen from it, or have I only allowed it to reveal itself at the end of the passage? ‘But to suddenly move from pleasant objects to ruins leaves a splendid impression,’ D.C. Fester continues – does he experience the splendid impression as a stab of melancholy in the area around the heart, at decay and impermanence, the area around the heart precisely where a lightness was felt, the nostrils still in convulsive contractions, from the scent of flowers on the path?

  III. THE PARTY BREAKS UP

  ‘Someday, she mused, one’s past must be put in order. Retouched, retaken. Certain �
��wipes” and “inserts” will have to be made in the picture; certain telltale abrasions in the emulsion will have to be corrected; “dissolves” in the sequence discreetly combined with the trimming out of unwanted, embarrassing “footage”, and definite guarantees obtained; yes, someday – before death with its clap-stick closes the scene.’

  — Vladimir Nabokov, Ada

  THE PATIENTS or CAMILLA AND ALMA’S EARLY YEARS

  [Camilla]

  I.

  Other people’s homes have a dreary and engrossing effect on me when I see them from the outside, like flies and flypaper (I am the fly). The thought of having to spend my life there. I would hate to wait out my years in there as the walls squeezed the life out of me.

  My own previous homes have had more or less the same effect on me. On occasion I go to Jægersborg and stand outside and look up at the flat I lived in until I left home. I look at the windows in the room that was first called ‘the playroom’ and later simply ‘your room’.

  Up there they allowed black material from their heavy hearts to drip on me whilst they gave me the title, Sol.

  At this very moment I am sitting on the train (I’ve been to Jægersborg again) racing past a series of superbly built but harsh brown façades – and I begin to feel disheartened and threatened by the walls, completely at their mercy, as though I have unwillingly had a series of lives forced upon me. In the short story ‘The Destructors’ by Graham Greene, a gang systematically destroys a house from within so that only the walls remain; fastened to a lorry the walls too collapse in the end – yes like a house of cards, but with a crash and in a cloud of dust. The reason for this destruction is beauty. The house is old and beautiful. In the hall there is a two-hundred-year-old spiral staircase, and there is tall wood panelling on the walls.

  (There are other reasons; one of the boys who came up with the idea is the son of a failed architect, perhaps the attack is directed at what would not come to be in the father’s world: buildings; perhaps his failure weighed on the family like a heavy cloud and has led to quiet embittered family meals.)

  OF, the gentleman who was unfortunate enough to set fire to my mum’s wastepaper basket in Vordingborg, was a weekly guest at our dinner table from the time I was fifteen or sixteen, and that continued long after I had left home, in fact maybe until his death. The first time I met him, Alma was also there, we were both wearing her slim, long-legged boyfriend’s worn skinny jeans, written down Alma’s left thigh were the words ‘fuck me, baby’ in felt tip, when my mum saw that, she froze, she covered her mouth with her hand. The rest of the afternoon Alma made sure to cover the spot with her hand, it looked a little awkward when she got up, and in fact, OF had probably noticed it straight away, because the black writing stood out against the pale blue, almost white material, but he was not that prudish. Alma and I sat thigh-to-thigh on the sofa, and sitting across from us in separate armchairs were OF and my mum, we all smoked, OF incessantly so. He had a long melancholy face, dyed-black hair with brilliantine (flat, not like a wave in suspense), wore black-rimmed German glasses, his skin was white, made even whiter by the black frame, and soft, I must have brushed it with my lips when he arrived, and again when he was going home and grabbed me and pressed me against his green polar coat so that my stiff back and neck cracked.

  The smoke served as a curtain between him and the world, he sat behind it observing, with a friendly smile and a veiled gaze (veiled by erotic thoughts? veiled by melancholy?), then a vigilant gaze, depending on whether he listened to something within himself or to us, and when he spoke, he leaned forward and slowly poked holes in the smoke with his cigarette. He seemed to exist in constant fear of being attacked (which we did not have the least urge to do, he was sweetness itself), and to disarm us he offered us florid praise and a steady stream of compliments, very distracting, very flattering, eventually very tedious as well. Because are we meant to praise him in return, or can we continue the conversation? No, we cannot, we can only extract these flowers from the bunch and hand them to one another. Everything kept coming to a standstill. We have to placate one another, no matter how placid we might be. When he walked through the living room, he ducked his head. He was tall, but in no danger of banging his head against the ceiling.

  He was lean and always wore a suit and sat with his legs crossed and his arms over his chest, only his smoking hand poked up, his overworked right hand. But within this cage of limbs, laughter was not infrequently heard. How old was he? He was a journalist, now on early retirement. Being out of the workforce was not easy for him. It was not easy for him when the war had ended, and the action film had reached ‘The End’, he had liquidated three informers and stashed his wartime weapons, one evening he brought his pistol with him and let us hold it, it felt dangerous in my hand, like having an independent life that could suddenly break out, and I put it down again, after a couple of steps. Naturally it was not loaded. To my mum’s great surprise (and delight I think) one evening he brought it loaded to a nine o’clock showing at the Grand in order to be prepared for the walk to Central Station around midnight. The other day I was stopped in the street by an elderly lady who introduced herself as a childhood friend of my mum from their time as supply teachers in Stege, and she said: ‘Your mum was wild. We were three supply teachers, always together. She was without a doubt the wildest.’

  I asked her how the wildness manifested itself. And she mentioned a summerhouse they had rented on Ulvshale, red wine, midnight dips, visits from young men, supply teachers too, perhaps, all either seventeen or eighteen.

  When my mum was a young child, her life revolved around a desire for two things – to one day host a literary salon and to accomplish great feats, to be strong and brave, and she passed that on to me, she had swum across the channel (with the ferry surging towards her), she had swum across Grønsund, she had swum with a pack of seals far off the coast of Anholt and had completely forgotten about the distance back to the island, fascinated at being so close to the seals that she could see their eyelashes. She was expecting me. The story inspired Alma to write a mythologically influenced poem in the spirit of (the late) Bjørnvig or of Lundby’s, ‘The Seal Woman’, where she concocted a story about a conception via seal semen during her swim, but she was very young. When she read it out loud to us, for a moment I was scared that my mum would react in the same way as the time I prepared a recorder concert for the family on Christmas Eve, where she and my grandmother cried with laughter because I breathed through the pipe, drew the air in and blew it out again while I (indefatigable) whistled, which had also made my music teacher decide that I should only pretend to play at the school concert since he could not exclude me. I still have the small brush that looks like a pipe cleaner that was used to clean out the recorder, supposedly of saliva, now I use it to clean the small hole in the fridge that keeps getting blocked by bits of food without understanding the function of this hole, but if it is not kept clean, the entire fridge fills with water, and I think of the music teacher, Mr Florian, a light name for a heavy man of thirty, and his wife, also a music teacher, who once saw me, while walking down the corridor to our classroom, pull a girl’s hair (not very hard, really just a friendly little tug on her brown ponytail because it was so thick and enticing) and so she snuck up behind me and grabbed my ponytail (in an iron grip) and pulled my head back so hard that it nearly struck the floor. Music classes took place in the basement, in the same place we collected school milk, and the couple never seemed to leave, but overweight and old before their time, with, respectively, full beards and double chins and pearl necklaces, lived a basement life filled with music. I’m afraid of dark, deep water (what it might contain) and have only managed to conquer that fear whilst intoxicated, I swam across Hald Sø one night, rather tipsy, with a three-man-band (incredibly white against the darkness and Hald’s majestic trees as they pulled off their clothes with their backs turned to me, I still remember the one with the squidgy, slightly too fleshy buttocks), so that I did not shudder
at the thought of the thirty-one metres of black water beneath me, incidentally a titbit (the depth) that one of the band offered up, swimming, that this lake with its thirty-one metres of water was the second deepest in the country, but articulating the information frightened him so much that he turned back. And across Peblinge Sø, which is not deep, in the same condition. It was after a wedding (that had featured street vendors who sold jewellery from Helligaandskirken on Strøget, or played guitar, or sold hash), that Tim and I had been to, as Tim went with me back to Copenhagen, and we lived with my mum for a couple of months until we found a sublet with hideous purple and pink walls that I woke up to each morning with a heavy head; I was working as a waiter at Peder Oxe, and when I finished around midnight, the other waiters and the Irish cleaner – ‘Jesus, Mary and the fucking donkey,’ he shouted every time one of us slipped on a kitchen floor that grew gradually more and more slippery and covered with scraps of food as the evening wore on, and dropped a stack of plates – used to go out and spend all our tips on drinks. Here it is necessary to mention Jeanette, also a waitress, a former model, I recall a cover of Vogue, Jeanette wearing a white bathing suit on a beach; when her career was already over, she was no more than twenty, due to drugs, at this point she had just begun to snort heroin with her idle boyfriend Mikael and his idle friends whom I met once in their messy flat in Nyhavn, where Jeanette showed me all her covers and told me about the terrible things from her childhood. She had grown up in a tower block with large glass windows, one wall in the living room might have been made entirely of glass. Her dad perpetually threatened to take his own life by jumping out the window, and once out of desperation Jeanette had said: ‘Just do it, then,’ whereupon her dad had got up from the sofa (which I imagine was made of leather) and threw himself out, he could hardly have thrown himself through the glass, so maybe the wall was not made of glass after all. When she threw her head back in laughter, her breasts made up half the laugh, even René, the head waiter, was amenable. Jeanette and I wanted to sell sandwiches at Roskilde Festival, and she arranged to buy everything for the project through Peder Oxe so the large quantities of cheese sausage ham salad cucumber tomato bread would be far cheaper than if we had purchased them ourselves, and we also used the kitchen and produced an astronomical number of sandwiches and René drove us to Roskilde in a Peder Oxe van. The sandwiches sold like, well like hot bread, even when they got soggy, everything could be sold if it was accompanied by Jeanette’s chortling breast-shaking laugh; when there were no more cheese sandwiches left, and when a male vegetarian wanted to buy something from us, Jeanette opened the soggy wet sandwiches and picked out the sausage or ham with her not particularly clean hands and pressed the wilted salad into the butter, and the vegetarian was happy, the marks from her nails in the butter perhaps even a bonus. Tim was also at the festival, but we were growing apart, he hung out with a group of foreigners who hung out in front of Helligaandskirken, two Americans and an Israeli, all jewellery pedlars (ceaseless guitar playing, ceaseless hash smoking) and married to Danish girls ten years their junior, girls who were about to become anthropologists or sociologists, and there was also this small group of Peruvians from the Andes playing pan pipes in ponchos. The thin man in a suit with the sheepish expression who sold roses, whom Alma said owned a house in Hellerup, stopped holding out a rose whenever he saw me, but nodded instead, figures who had until now only served as points of reference on Strøget for me, but thankfully Tim had not become friends with any of those people who pretend to be a statue, sprayed either bronze or silver or completely white (or had he, all of a sudden I sense a strange rubbery person sneaking around the outskirts of my recollection), I am hypersensitive to them, I cannot stand them, this posing, the arm extended and the leg stretched back ‘look how still I can stand,’ this alleged stillness, in an uncomfortable position to boot, they infuriate me, I consider them malicious, and in fact I was once confirmed in my aversion towards them in Madrid when I passed one and the person in question suddenly leaned forward with a hiss and pinched my arm like I needed to be woken from a dream, and I had needed that, because I had just come from a Goya exhibition; maybe, I thought, he is taking vengeance on behalf of all the living statues because I find them so incredibly revolting. Maybe they remind me of depressives (frozen stiff out of sheer misery) or of corpses. Every time I see one, an imitation statue, I hear the following lines in my head: ‘Tordenskjold, he was roguish / went around and sold fish.’