Peter continued trying to hammer mathematics into us, mania was replaced by depression, and so on. Alma and I visited him once when he was in one of the heavy phases. He had barricaded himself in a bedsit on Fælledvej, in a loft, all the way up on the top floor, and the floor beneath him was almost invisible because of various piles, clutter and rubbish. It smelled like being in a cage, afflicted and ill, with no future.
There were the more peripheral patients whom I never saw, but only heard about or talked on the phone with. Kaj, who always wore black gloves, and whom my mum was afraid to run into when she crossed the grounds between two wards. He had once slapped her so hard that her ears sang. He was a schizophrenic and could not tolerate eye contact. Maybe she had been injured for meeting his gaze. There was an opera singer with a handsomely wavy beard (one day his business card had mistakenly ended up in my school bag and then on the floor of the classroom, I was teased about him, the business card was passed around) and a tremendously deep voice. There was the signwriter Else from Vienna who painted a nameplate for our door, green with gold lettering. And a handsome old Jew with a cracked voice who gave my mum silverware, five short knives and five short forks for eating fruit, strangely short, as if your hands had grown smaller by the time you reached dessert. Charles and I got them later as a wedding present.
Several years earlier that which must not happen happened, something completely inexcusable. My mum had fallen in love with one of her patients and had started a relationship with him. I was eleven. She was forty-two. He was twenty-six. In my mind the relationship is in triple slo-mo; on three separate occasions my body reacted seemingly independent of my will – or of any planning – and it felt as though I found some distance from it (the body) and saw it act (how each of its movements appeared slow, and at once far too clear and dispersed). Each experience is connected with objects (which are all red or reddish). A red bag, a reddish beard, an orange and a burgundy sweater. When my mum told me that she had met him, and that he was moving in with us, I got so furious that my body sent me through the living room with a roar of anger, ‘not you too,’ I roared and I meant that she now, like my father (the previous year), had found someone else; the anger culminated in me stomping around, jumping up and down on her red bag so that everything inside must have been damaged. Now I have a red leather bag like that. (Nobody has trampled on it yet.) I managed to prevent him from moving in. He came and went with us. I grew fond of him, and one day when he was about to leave, I followed him to the front door, my body shot over to him, and I placed my arm around his neck and pressed my cheek against his. He glided out the door, deprived of all reality. Afterwards I was only aware that it had happened because I could still feel his beard against my chin. He was healthy when he began to stay with us. He got ill. He began to air his thoughts to me; that my mum was out to poison him. I replied that I most definitely did not believe that to be the case. When my mum found out about it, I had asked her one day if it was true, she demanded that he no longer visit us. (So his thoughts would not harm me.) There was a scene. All the while I sat at the dining table spinning an orange in my hands and hating him and supporting my mum. I wanted to throw the orange at him. It developed into him grabbing her by the shoulders. I flew up and elbowed my way between them and shoved his chest (he was wearing his burgundy coloured roll-neck sweater) and rammed my head into it. He left. In the time that followed I imagined that when I was home alone an unseen person wanted to poison me, and so I transported food or drinks with me from room to room. I dared not leave a glass of milk or a cup of tea unguarded in a room. It was a great love. They could meet during his good periods. He had moved to Jutland, and my mum visited him there, on a holiday, on a couple of weekends. He had long since stopped being her patient. When they started the relationship, he must have been taken on by another doctor. She was good for him; and he her. His sisters later told her that; that they were grateful for the happiness that had flowed to him, through her. He had sworn that if he did not get healthy by the time he turned thirty, he would kill himself. And he did not get healthy. When my mum told me about his death (I had just come home from a bike trip on Fyn with Alma), she looked down and banged the edge of her cigarette pack on the table, this tapping and her lowered gaze stated the finality – and how difficult it was to accept.
Around this triple slo-mo there is almost no recollection of him; his coat on the hook and a visit with his friendly sisters, one light and one dark, their toilet seat was sprayed with gold paint. And then the intensity between the two of them, almost tangible, and a pair of wine glasses on the bedside table one morning I went into their bedroom; the two plump glasses leaning against each other was the new love in the house. A love mixed with the thought of poisoning. A love that tore at everything, and that I wanted to conceal. I wanted them to stay inside the flat, not walk arm in arm outside in the world. Not because he had been her patient, I knew nothing about that back then. Because I wanted everything to be the way it normally was. That is what I wanted ‘the others’ (a word I always used about my classmates) to think. I could not be left on my own with a shattered nuclear family. But I was, and for that reason I stayed home from school for long periods. Until suddenly a liberator entered the picture; Alwilda joined my class and cheerfully dragged a trail of stepmothers and stepfathers behind her. Now there were two of us.
We lived with the secret that my mum herself had taken ill, twice after I was born and several times as a young woman. One morning when I woke up, she was not there; I hit my dad when he told me that she had been taken to the hospital. I was five or six. She later told me that the mania had given her a fever. The first night of her hospitalization, because of a lack of beds, she had been placed in a bathroom. The tap dripped, and she said something to me about the sound, maybe that it mixed with her thoughts, her feverish mind, and that she was thirsty, but did not get a glass of water. Maybe she said that each time it felt like the drop hit her forehead. Then I imagine a stone slowly being hollowed out.
I was too young to have realized that she was getting ill. Later I understood that there was something wrong when she started to reorganize the flat – the start of the belongings’ cruise which later in life, when she had been diagnosed with cancer and got ill one time after another like she sat on a see-saw and flew up in the air and fell down again heavily (fear of death made it impossible to keep the illness in check), expressed itself wholeheartedly. She sent furniture and small belongings from one place to the next as if this movement guaranteed life.
How I watched over her.
Maybe once in a moment of weakness she had asked me to do it, to keep watch over her. And if I saw signs of either sadness or heightened activity, I asked her (in a very quiet voice so as not to rouse her anger since I found myself in dangerous territory), ‘do you think you might be getting ill?’
It was never chaotic. (And it was always immensely clean, it smelled of Ajax, vinegar and floor wax, and in my mind the smell in the bathroom is dense with moisture and the smell of wet linen, because for a long time she washed everything by hand, in the bath.) Only new forms of order. She took precautions against clutter, the clinging of belongings to one another. She gave things away, including things she thought I had grown out of. It made me beside myself with bitterness. She acquired nothing, made no frivolous purchases, she disposed of things. She talked too much, went way too far in her talking and grew short-tempered – she could not stand being contradicted or interrupted – as though her long chain of thoughts could snap if someone so much as cleared their throat. The usual, patient, gentle and attentive person was replaced by an irritable and headstrong monster.
From that point onward (while I was a child) she managed to keep the mania in check, with the help of medicine and rest.
The second time was depression. Or was it simply complete exhaustion. She was faced with divorce. It was January. She had made it through Christmas (which she had held for the entire family) and had attempted to grin and bear it (my
father, the infidelity, his impending move), so that Christmas was not ruined for me. In January she could not take it any longer. The Christmas tree was still standing. A few friends of the family (particularly my dad’s), one of whom was a doctor, came by one Saturday afternoon and persuaded her to have herself admitted. They must have come unannounced, in any case she had not managed to put the shopping away, the bulging shopping bags were leaned up against a chair during the entire conversation. She consented to have herself admitted. I experienced it as if she was being taken away. I was given an aquarium in an attempt to console me. I thought that (again) something had happened that at all costs should be kept hidden. I told my friends she was on a holiday. But I came close to revealing it. When I showed one of them the aquarium, I said: ‘How annoying that you can’t take aquariums with you to the hospi…’ I wanted to show my mum the fish immediately. She came home after ten days, and I heard her tell my godmother that she had thrown a slipper at my dad during one of his visits; my godmother pointed me out (pointed in my direction, said my name) to get her to keep quiet, not reveal any more information. My mum might have shrugged, her anger surpassed consideration for me, her anger was volcanic.
After the two hospitalizations she always feared running into a colleague who knew that she had taken ill, one who had treated her or who had simply heard about it. She was afraid it would be held against her if she sought a new position; that it would undermine her authority, that she would be considered incompetent. And she was afraid of getting ill again. She was afraid of coming down in the world after she had become a sole provider.
Maybe the fact that she herself had been ill made her more empathetic, a better doctor.
In my mind, when I look into the house in Jægersborg, I have the impression of destruction, as though I am using a screwdriver against the internal components of existence, against the glass wall that surrounds these secrets. Not that the secrets are subversive now. But they were back then, both for my mother and for me. Well, I am a worm in my own apple.
II.
My mum is the one who has taught me to take notice of nature. But I cannot remember the names of the flowers, in any case not very many at a time. She quizzes me on them – stops and bends down and asks me the name of a flower. And I cannot remember it, or I mistake it for another flower. Not even her favourite flower, periwinkle, do I recognize all the time. It looks far too much like another bluish-purple flower.
It must have been some sort of magic, the time she put a handful of dried hazelnuts in milk and they swelled up and tasted like they had been freshly picked – viewed from my height at the time, that of a five-year-old. And this: by the Neretva in Mostar, long before the bridge over the river was bombed, a small group of children approached us and held out their hands. My mum searched her pockets and her bag for change, to no avail. The children were my age, nursery school children. Then she pulled a perfume bottle out of her bag and indicated to the children that they should hold out their wrists, and then each of them got a puff of Madame Rochas on their thin arms. I have a sense that you could feel the water from the river in the air, and that the perfume arrived like a dark heavy gust.
The other day when I saw a painting by Kiefer, a painting of an enormous sunflower at the foot of which, a man is keeled over, (the title of the painting is Sol Invictus) I thought, that was how it was to be a child of hers. The sunflower head looked like a shower head. One moment warmth, the next in danger of drowning. I am the one who is keeled over at the foot of the flower. I have died the sun death, I have died the flower death.
My mum is very clear. She wants so much for me, ‘I will fight for you like a lion, to my last drop of blood.’ To help me. She gives me books by the stack. An entire bookcase. Sound advice. Furniture when I left home. I was given the sofa on which we followed conversations through to their countless ramifications, unfortunately as impossible to relate as music, she’d had it reupholstered. I had chosen the colour. A subdued green, green with cream. Support me. Understand me, refuse me (causing a death-like sensation), (‘I’m no longer your grandma,’ my grandmother said because I had spent the money she gave me, on a suede jacket from Flip Machine with holes in it. She interpreted the holes as an insult. I could just as well have let the money disappear down a drain.) They (the women) demand, they command (the first time Alma met my grandmother she commanded me to look under the bed for her glasses, I crawled underneath and banged my head on the bottom of the bed. In the end the bow-wow emerged with the glasses in its mouth.) They attempt to shape me, and they are so angry at the men because of their negligence that they (the men) only remain visible as objects for these enormous waves of anger, weaklings foundering on anger’s beach. Maybe my dad will only become visible in his own right when my mum dies.
(I am not going to go to that place where I regard her as almost Christ-like, accompanied by a harlot – though the harlot went away again – and a handful of lesser lunatics.) Good thing I have Alma, she preserves the equilibrium the common sense the grounding. She is The Voice of Reason, usually, when it doesn’t completely abandon her, as with Kristian.
When I was a child, living in the flat below us was a mother and daughter who to me seemed more or less the same age; they dressed the same, in black clothes, and always looked so unhappy, a kind of eternal mourning. I don’t know if the daughter never left home, or if she had moved back home, maybe after a rocky marriage. Never a sound was heard from their flat. It was a grave. On occasion one of them would stick their nose out, holding a bin bag or a net bag. One day one of them died. Shortly after the other one killed herself. Unable to live without each other. The alarming coalescence. Unable to break free of one another. The two of them an example of the worst possible way things can turn out – between mother and daughter.
When my mum was thirteen, at her island’s library, she started with A and worked her way through to Z. She ingested everything that could be read. Some things she understood, others she did not. She dreamed of hosting a salon, of becoming a Madame de Staël. And then she ended up with her cabinet of patients. A few close friends. And us: me, Alma and now Charles. I have always wanted her to have the best conversation partners; that her thinking, her knowledge would come into its own. And been unhappy that it does not always do that, that it is stranded within her. She spends her spare time in bed, in her bathrobe and on her heating pad, reading. I often have to stop myself from writing ‘book’ in a sentence where I should have written ‘mum’, ‘mum’ where I should have written ‘book’. The two words are more than inextricably bound; they are substitutions for each other.
Sometimes I am unable to take in what she tells me; my thoughts drift somewhere else while she talks, or I just sit staring at her face. Then I strain every nerve, I revise it, like exam material; it could be Golda Meir’s biography, European revolutions; I latch onto the material – so that her efforts have significance, and because I am curious.
Her boyfriend when I was twenty, Mogens, was an (out and out) anti-intellectual. It would have made sense for him and OF to get on well with each other considering they had both been active in the resistance movement and neither of them had ever really got over it, but they did not. They were jealous of each other’s exploits, the former resistance fighters approached each other suspiciously. OF had his three murdered informers, Mogens had done something heroic at an improbable young age (and then the enervating period afterwards, to have to spend three or four years in a camp in Sweden just waiting), and they were jealous of each other’s relationship with my mum. She had fallen in love with Mogens at school where he was a couple of years above her. They had once shared a kiss, at a school party, where incidentally she had also asked Torry Gredsted, the author of Paw, to dance, thereby winning a bet (he was a former student at the boarding school on Bogø and present for that reason). The boarding school is an imposing red building with jagged towers, like a small fortress (historicism), and with large chestnut trees in front of the main building. I have walk
ed past countless times, but have never been inside or so much as crossed the gravel drive. And I have never been able to connect the building with my mum’s childhood, only with my own, where at first the building (quite simply) signified that I was halfway up the hill, and later it seemed to me to be a tad ridiculous – borrowing its power and authority from the fortress. On the other hand… now that I am speaking condescendingly of it, I notice that I simultaneously experienced it as a dear old sweater, immensely familiar, and just like the church and the old lighthouse a point that was visible from Grønsund when arriving by boat.
Mogens (surprisingly) went to visit her during a hospitalization when they were at school. But suddenly he disappeared from the boarding school on the island – the resistance movement, the camp in Sweden. Hero was a word associated with him. He looked like Morten Nielsen, with a large mouth, ‘still too lowly to die’ and ‘I am the glow of the cigarette,’ she did not forget him. Then one day, after she had turned fifty, he called her and invited her to dinner. She went out and bought a new dressing gown and stood sipping a glass of wine in his kitchen when he suddenly fell to his knees in front of her and wrapped his arms around her hips and buried his head in her bosom. She patted his shaved head, slightly embarrassed, but did not return home until a few days later. He was a telegraph operator on various ships, and she thought that it was ideal having a man who was away the majority of the time. In the beginning she cheerfully gave herself to his way of life, she wore motorcycle gear and sat on the back of his Nimbus, or in the sidecar. (When he insisted on driving her to work, she wriggled out of the leather gear behind a bush, on the grounds, before she set foot in her ward.) She even went to a couple of meetings at the motorcycle club. Mogens believed in the importance of sharing each other’s interests and doing everything together. (She quickly began to feel that her long evenings and weekends in bed with books were under threat.) She dutifully ate the rich food he made according to an old fashioned cookbook, until her figure began to bulge, something he (incidentally) had nothing against. He was athletic to behold when after a shower he jumped from bathroom to bedroom in his underpants. I imagined a faun, but a faun stripped of all poetry, not one from Afternoon of a Faun. He had a white, well-groomed goatee. Things became different in the flat. A blue haze of cigar smoke hovered below the ceiling, there was always an open bottle of red wine, the one with the bull on it, on the kitchen counter. When he laughed, there was no sound, he leaned forward and fell victim to a silent breakdown, straightened up and continued sucking on his cigar. Like other men with average talents, because it has to be said that was the case with him, he had ‘matters’ he defended and argued endlessly in relation to. While I rolled my eyes. The traffic, I seem to recall vaguely, was something he had a hard time letting go of. I wonder what he might have thought about that? In all likelihood he made sarcastic comments about cyclists. Himself a motorcyclist. The dinner table where OF, Alma and I were regular Friday guests, became an agitated and tedious place. It normally ended with OF folding in his long arms and legs and smoking within his shell. Mogens read the same two books over and over again. The Long Ships volume I and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His face was ruddy and worn by weather and wind. His eyes were blue. The stubble on his head was straw or sand coloured. My mum persuaded him to let his hair grow. She associated his practically bald head with violence. So he grew it. But it made him look older and more haggard, like a crofter. He distanced himself from Information, the newspaper she had read for the better part of thirty years. He would only watch films with happy endings. He was straight-laced. At the sculpture museum, the sight of The Water Mother surrounded by her many children made him spin on his heels and exit Glyptoteket.
Companions Page 21