And Alma was there too, I think I neglected both her and Tim in favour of Jeanette (having new friends has always made me so happy), until I saw two Red Cross workers with Alma between them walking towards the Red Cross tent, and I ran after them. For want of something better, Alma had eaten an entire jar of caffeine pills and was wriggling like an eel out of anxiety. Not long after I lay down next to Alma after a brief but brilliant spell (speed), and Sunday night we went home together, stooped over our racing hearts, taking slow steps, like two old frightened people. I don’t know where Jeanette and Tim were. The last time I ran into Jeanette, some years later, the time at Peder Oxe was long past, it had only been one spring and one summer, she came to see me, her face was covered in inflamed spots and she did not laugh. Someone she owed money to had torched her flat, with her two cats inside, it was impossible to recover from such an atrocity, of course. She was flat broke, and I remember giving her a block of cheese with black rinds when she left, it had been lying in the fridge for a long time and I didn’t like it because it was matured. That was the last I saw of her, I hope she isn’t dead, I can’t remember her surname, maybe I never knew it. But I do remember all her various tops and her eagerness to make money, which led us to try our hand at selling sandwiches. Once, maybe she could not get hold of anyone else, all bridges to that scene burnt, I went with her on a photoshoot for leather clothing, I was a size 10 but not that tall, but she managed to get me teetering on a pair of incredibly high heels and made me up, she was very pleased with my transformation and searched her memory for the name of a French model she thought I looked like, and she encouraged every bit of affectation on my part, like for example my reluctance to wear white, ‘white doesn’t suit me,’ I said, I had heard Alma say that about me, ‘isn’t there something mmm a little more soft,’ I said and flicked through the clothes racks, the photographs were taken, and we got our money, but not as much as Jeanette had expected, and she flew off in a rage at one of the leather guys, who called her attention to, I remember it clearly, her fall from grace (after appearing on the cover of Vogue) and my status as a complete novice, only previously photographed for family albums, which was true enough and not the least bit insulting, but I thought I should show solidarity and support Jeanette and her exasperation. Then we teetered off again, I couldn’t cope with her talk about heroin, and I couldn’t get her to talk sensibly, she kept interjecting my reprimands and pleas with the story about her dad and the window. Around the same time Alma and I took part in a hair show, a promo for our hairdresser, a stocky pockmarked gentleman who had hired Lotte Heise to organize the show at a hotel; with our hair up in a kind of tight whip high on the top of our heads (like the Chinese men you see in martial arts films) and wearing six-inch heels and extremely tight dresses we had to walk up and down a catwalk while playing pink violins (replicas), it was difficult to appear relaxed whilst simultaneously trying to work out what reality this scenario feigned to have stemmed from, maybe we were meant to depict some kind of overgrown geishas. Alma stoops, and the heels made it even worse, it made her appear furtive, her shoulders hunched up by her chin and her head protruding and bent over the violin, I could not reconcile myself with the violin either (even with my previous experience pretending to play an instrument), ‘you’re holding it like a nun holds a sailor’s cock,’ Heise screamed at me with her usual sensitivity, and during the break she told me to only eat one sandwich, ‘more won’t do you any good,’ not two, like the others, a strangely hollow sound escaped me and I took a second one anyway. Several years later on a TV show, after she was unable to spell Nietzsche when asked to, she buried her face in her hands and broke down over his name as though it were a flogged horse, and I nodded in satisfaction. Nietzsche went up to join violin and sandwich number two.
Tim (in that period) was a dishwasher at a restaurant in Kongelunden. My mum was worried that I worshipped and submitted to him, she said that she had looked out the window one day when we left her flat, and that I had walked a couple of metres behind him ‘like a squaw’, maybe my skirt had been of a Native American cut, ‘so, have you found yourself a new guru,’ she said, but for her part, she delighted in making his favourite dish, lamb with mint sauce, just for him, and moreover she was the one who had a guru who had assigned her a mantra, and she sat meditating in the evening when the house was quiet, the mantra was secret, but after she had (long since) stopped meditating because it became too intense for her, she revealed the mantra to me, one time she had had an orgasm while meditating, sitting bolt upright staring straight ahead, with her palms facing up in a receptive gesture, and another time a black goat, apparently the Devil, had exploded before her eyes, and I had expected some wonderful word, one that I had never heard before, but then the mantra turned out to be ‘Jesus’. I was disappointed in the same way as when you are given an object you already have, a duplicate.
Back to the wedding, to round off the talk about water and swimming. I was nineteen, I stripped down and quickly made it to the opposite side of Peblinge Sø. When I climbed ashore, a water rat poked its head up, depriving me of the pleasure of swimming back. So I had to run across Dronning Louises Bro in my knickers and collect my clothes where I had left them. On the bridge a police car had stopped at a red light. I kept my right arm over my breasts and kept my balance with my left.
Tim. He was not my first love, my first love was a receptionist (Crete), maybe I’ll come back to him.
No, now.
For the first time a melted soul in a melted body, in his room, in the basement, beneath the reception where he worked. He called me glicka (sweet) and offered me eucalyptus pastilles (from his lips), and we walked together in the darkness outside the hotel. How did this first walk come about? It was the very first evening, my dad and I had arrived at the hotel, we were spending the half-term break in Crete, and we went for a stroll. I was fifteen and did not wear make-up, only lip balm, all the time. He was eighteen or twenty-one, I don’t remember, and his eyebrows were joined. Brown pageboy haircut. His face slightly triangular, like a goat, or maybe I am confusing it with the peculiar sight of a goat in a tree viewed from the bus on a trip somewhere in Crete where ice-cold retsina was served at the restaurant where we ate lunch, long pieces of cucumber and bowls of runny honey that we dipped the cucumber in. I (the child of fifteen) had generally stopped eating. Every night my dad and I walked down to a long narrow restaurant at the harbour. When I moved through the restaurant, the guests turned their heads, they could see I had become someone else. I thought so. What did we talk about, the father and the child who was no longer a child? That I could eat nothing? Beautiful dishes were placed in front of me, souvlaki on a skewer, blackened meat with lemon, tomato salad with feta, moussaka, stuffed peppers, fried potato wedges, yoghurt with honey and a drizzle of sesame seeds, but it was all too heavy for my pollenous body. I considered the food to be elements of the senses, part of the storm that blew through me, not potential nourishment. All it took was his name. Ni-cho-las (three syllables like in Lolita, and like in Lolita the tip of the tongue makes three small steps – and ends in the bed in the basement). My hands shook. I shook. I went out to the harbour and photographed the waves. My dad told me about Hokusai. And I have an entire series of waves captured directly before they turn. It’s windy. There are black cliffs, a yellowish-grey sea and the Second World War rears its ugly head: a concrete fortification.
I have a photograph of myself sitting on a donkey, in shorts, the owner of the donkey, an old man, rests his hand on my bare thigh, he looks sly, I am far too big for the donkey, and it looks like he is holding everything together, the donkey and me, with his hand and proprietorial air. I had been taught to be very polite, almost submissive, with people who clearly had less than I did (money, opportunities, education), that must be why I agreed to climb up on the donkey and why I found myself in this man’s hands. My mind had long since been set with the idea that people or entire groups of people who have been victims could not exercise bad behavi
our or malice. I thought (still at the age of fifteen) that all Native Americans were good, all Jews, all black Americans and all poor, old, donkey-owning farmers in Crete.
Endlessly tiring pent-up wet hard stiff, we did not sleep together. Nor do I think we removed much clothing. I think we must have touched each other beneath our clothes and kissed for hours. But maybe that’s not right. Now I suddenly remember his bare legs. And that he had a shower afterwards and blow-dried his hair whilst I lay on the bed watching. Every moment he did not have to work, we sought out his bed. My dad had to see the labyrinth in Knossos alone. He had to see all of Crete alone. I only wanted to go with Nicholas, down to the basement, down to his bed. Then the bus arrived to drive us to the airport. I dissolved into tears at our departure, the very core of life snatched away, I had pressed my face against infinity and now sat alone, buried in my father’s handkerchief. And the grown-ups on the bus, probably well meaning, probably considerate, my loud sniffling heard throughout the silent bus until the guide found his voice, on the microphone. I had to believe that what I was going through at that moment, they had all been through it, that it was a kind of childhood sorrow. I had to believe that love and goodbyes were something they used to get on prescription, in measured doses.
We never saw each other again, but we wrote to each other for seven years, spanning new loves, and for him, marriage and children, and each year around Christmas he went to the photographer and sent me a photograph of himself, always well groomed, with the upturned (using a hairdryer) ends resting on the edge of his top or shoulders, all depending on what fashion (in Crete) dictated that year. (When Charles was going to move in, I threw out all the photographs and love letters I had, his too, but I remember these photographs particularly well, even his pullovers, a new one each year, the pattern on the patch of pullover that was included in the photograph.)
Alma and I met Tim in Amsterdam where he worked at the bar of our hotel, actually it was a youth hostel, he looked like a contented angel, long reddish-blond hair, freckles, scout knife. His black T-shirt was a washed-out whitish-grey, and there was a faint odour when you got right up close to him, not really unpleasant, just a whiff of sweat. Nothing more happened than him asking for our address; his address book, it turned out, was his bible because he was travelling the world and was happy to have some destinations. A few days after Alma and I had returned to Copenhagen, he rang at our door – we lived together. That same night the door to my room opened. He later told me that he had been in doubt as to which door to choose, mine or Alma’s. It turned out to be mine, because he said ‘Alma is big, big with a capital B,’ he was fairly slim and no more than five foot six. Alma is tall. And it’s true that Alma was a little overweight at that time, but I was too, I worked as a cleaning assistant at Gentofte Hospital as a part of the emergency response team, we appeared when an operation had finished and quickly readied the operating room, the floor often strewn with pools of blood and unidentifiable organic material, for the next operation. During the operations I killed time by drinking fruit cordial and eating tea biscuits, leant over my mop or my little handy cart (handy if the wheels had worked properly and did not drive to one side so that we had to zigzag across the corridor when the surgeon opened the door to the operating room, taking long strides as he pulled the mask from his stone face and removed his gloves… then it was our turn, me and the mop.) A lot of students at my secondary school (from which I had graduated with terrible results, and now worked as a cleaner) worked as cleaners at the hospital on the weekends, and white hospital vests with blue-striped sleeves (the name of a commercial laundry imprinted on a blue patch on the stomach) were the fashion at school, making us look like escaped patients – and white hospital bathrobes for use at home, this white terrycloth had a touch of Hollywood to it. At parties we drank a strange sweet nectar made with medical alcohol, it sent several people to the hospital, to have their stomachs pumped, whereby it (the medical alcohol) returned from whence it came, home, you might say. I too had smuggled a bathrobe out of the hospital. When my mum discovered that I had appropriated something from an institution, she was beside herself, and I had to hop on my bike straight away and smuggle it back in, to the scrub room, in the laundry basket.
OF also owned a cannon, he kept it in a storage unit on Amager. But we never saw it. He did not arrive with his cannon in tow every Friday night, only his shopping trolley, the Mercedes of pensioners (he loved expressions like that; just as he loved jingles and took part in jingle contests and was happy when he won, his favourite was used by the Traffic Safety Commission, or so he claimed, ‘Why save a second, if it’s going to be your last’). But the shopping trolley worked against the appearance of youth his black hair was meant to present, it made him into an elderly man who could not manage the weight of his belongings. He had barely stepped inside the door when he began to take presents out of the trolley (in that way disarming us before he had even crossed the threshold), a tube of pea soup from Irma, a dark chocolate Guldbarre, newspaper and magazine clippings covering topics we had touched upon the last time we were together (when my mum got breast cancer he sent her, with the best intentions, an article containing gloomy statistics about survival and recovery rates that completely took the wind out of her sails, on this occasion there were also stickers of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang stuck to the envelope since they have a line for every situation in life. When she received the diagnosis, she rented a house where she was far from any neighbours, on the island of Nyord. A house where she could scream.
She rented a house where she could scream.
But she did not use it in the end and terminated the lease after a couple of months. I don’t think she ever did any screaming. Maybe she screamed into a pillow. I could not make it to the substance of the sentence when she told me about the house where she could scream; as if the words themselves and the act (the lease) stifled the desperation behind it.)
And he brought sleeping pills if anyone had complained of not being able to sleep – he would also send sleeping pills by post, unsolicited, swathed in cotton wool and placed in yellow Läkerol boxes, with rubber bands around them. The rubber bands always surprised me, because the boxes were closed, the pills were packed in cotton wool, there was no risk of them rolling out of the envelope, the rubber bands became the very picture of the pills’ strength, that they had to be stopped from breaking out of the box. They were old school sleeping pills, so to speak, Rohypnol, which his doctor let him accrue in a seemingly endless stream or maybe he bought them at his local, Polar Bodega, where according to him you could buy a little of everything, passports weapons pills, and ten minutes after you had swallowed a Rohypnol, it felt like you had been struck on the forehead, and if you dared to get out of bed and stand on your feet, it was like sailing on the high seas during a storm, the walls came crashing towards you, you raced towards them with outstretched arms. Or you went out like a light, deprived of the inconvenience of slipping off to sleep, and that was probably when my love of sleeping pills was established, but my doctor keeps me on a short leash, I receive a quota of ten sleeping pills per annum, altogether mild pills with the effect lasting only three to four hours. You can walk around unaffected after taking one. If you change your mind and don’t want to sleep after all – I often get the feeling that I don’t actually want to sleep, but think that I should, as though simultaneously acting as my own reluctant child and my own parent – you can simply stop yourself. Nabokov believed that humanity can be divided into two groups: those who can sleep and those who can’t. His father believed that humanity can be grouped depending on whether or not they appear attractive to others – as that which determines how life will take form. But if you stumble around in a haze of sleeplessness, you can scarcely notice your effect on others, or you misjudge it, like you misjudge so many other things.
Companions Page 19