A quick detour now that we are on the topic of children, the other day Clea (who is pregnant) told me the following: ‘…Stockholm. I was about to go on stage. I was nervous and had a terrible craving for a cigarette, just half a cigarette. Let me hasten to add that until now, during the pregnancy, I have smoked at most ten cigarettes in total. My mum on the contrary smoked up to a hundred a day because she was preparing for her exams while expecting me. I did not grow to be very tall, but that’s all right. Naturally smoking is not allowed at the theatre. I went into the ladies’ room. There was a queue. I felt the ladies in the queue casting suspicious glances at me. (I always feel as though I am on trial.) It was my turn, and I locked myself in the cubicle. I pulled a perfume bottle out of my bag and kneeled down in front of the toilet and stuck my head halfway down before daring to light the cigarette. It was by no means disgusting, you could have operated inside that toilet, it was antiseptic. While I smoked, I continually sprayed perfume into the air, with the other hand I flushed again and again smoking with no hands and blowing into the cistern. After five or six drags I dared not continue and let the cigarette drop into the water. Now I had obviously flushed so many times that there was no more water. I covered the cigarette with toilet paper and pleasantly dizzy, stepped out into the common area, onto the scaffold. They (the ladies) said nothing, they just looked at me with disappointment and shook their heads. I had not made them angry, I had made them sad. They thought about the little child in my belly. “Sorry,” I said. But they could not accept it, they were not the ones who had been harmed. I could beg and plead, I would never be forgiven. Only, perhaps, if I gave birth to a very tall child. I looked at the ladies and said: “The last scan showed that the child is extremely long, it practically has to lie folded over. It was recommended that I smoke a little to stifle its growth.” Now one of the ladies stepped forward: “No, no,” she said, “That’s not it at all. Do you not want there to be any water left for your child, the way you waste it…” and she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the stall (the obvious smell of smoke) above which there was a sign that I had overlooked.’
My mum had not been with Mogens for very long before she wanted to be rid of him again. She told us that we should guard ourselves against the might of unfinished business, by which she meant that if she had formed a relationship with Mogens when they had been young, this would never have happened. And he wanted to get married. He had already been married six times (though with the same woman twice), but that did not deter him. They shared no social norms; he appropriated small objects from institutions, an ashtray from a hospital cafeteria, shirts from one of the shipping companies he sailed with as a telegraph operator. He liked to pretend he was an officer and wore a uniform at festive occasions; where did these uniforms come from…? It boggled her mind. And once when they were out for dinner, he spat in the food because it had garlic in it, and stormed out of the restaurant. He laughingly told her about a ship’s cook who left children at every port, and when my mum objected to such irresponsible behaviour, he said shortly that it was the girls’ own fault (The Water Mother again). But did he not have a single redeeming feature… yes, in the beginning; wearing a red shirt and with this straw-like hair, the faun bent over the jug of rich sauce; he was interesting to us, first and foremost because he was new. Interesting in the same way as a merry insect. (But how he could sulk.) And because he arrived full of energy and dragged my mum out into the world. I have a holiday photo of them from Madeira where they appear slightly drunk and glistening. One time he drove me home on his motorcycle. I sat on the back and tried to hold onto him almost without touching him. He reached back and made me hold on properly while he laughed at me in his silent manner (shoulders shaking). It made me think of one of his ‘matters’, that he did not understand how mature men could be interested in little girls (that was how he viewed us) who did not share the same experiences, who had not lived in the same era and did not understand your references; in other words: who were far too young to have experienced the war.
Gradually all of our conversation revolved around how she wanted to be rid of him. They were about to buy a house together. Her need for isolation was seriously under threat. She pictured herself Saturday mornings forced to drink coffee at some random abominable centre. He had told her that if I continued to contradict him, I would not be welcome in their new home. (That did the trick. The lion rose to its feet.) He had already parted with his house on Amager and had moved in with her. His moving boxes were in my old room. In the end she decided that the escape from him would have to take place while he was off sailing. She applied for a job in Vordingborg that included a flat at the hospital and got it. She put up her flat for exchange, it worked out in my favour as I received a colossal flat. I was twenty-five and had long since moved away from home. Still it was difficult to say goodbye to the old place. I had known it my entire life. I lay down on her bed and dissolved into tears. She was doing a final clean-up and did not have time to deal with me. She had all of Mogens’ furniture and boxes put into storage. OF came by and disconnected the washing machine. Her own moving van arrived. The flat in Jægersborg became a mirage. In the gap between moving out and moving in she and I went to Portugal.
She sent Alma a postcard of an avalanche and wrote: ‘The load we loosen from each other’s minds.’
I saw it when I placed the card in the postbox.
OF wrote a rhyme: ‘Margrethe the luscious larva has travelled to Algarve.’ She sent a telegraph to the telegraph operator. He rang me (when we had returned home), shaken, and said that my mum’s conduct both as a normal human being and as a doctor had to be considered irresponsible. I replied that he had not been her patient.
She is old, now. She seldom dresses up. Maybe a pearl necklace at Christmas, a hint of lipstick. To make me happy. Because it shows a certain energy. I look at her mouth, and she says: ‘I knew it would make you happy.’ I fetch her a pillow, an ashtray, a glass of water, a cup of coffee, the newspaper, and am surprised how strong her shoulders feel. When I embrace her, I see that she has also put her red suede sandals on. They are (by now) the only thing we cannot agree on.
‘What do you actually have against them?’ she asks, stretching her legs and lifting them up so that she can better see the shoes from the sofa (which has been mine for so long that it needs reupholstering again), at home with Charles and I where she comes to dinner every Friday. And I feel terribly petty, terribly conventional, why can I not just leave her and her red shoes in peace. I ask to be allowed not to like them. I tilt my head and ask whether that is alright. I remind her of some of the worst outfits I have appeared in, which she did not care for.
‘The worst one though,’ she says to Charles, ‘was the time she was going to a party, I ran into her in the stairwell, I was on my way up and she was on the way down – I mention it because if I had been home while she was getting dressed, I would never have let her go out like that – and she was wearing a delightful black velour dress with pink fabric roses sewn on and had bare shoulders, and with that she wore tan tights and brown walking shoes, and then she had rolled a pair of white sports socks down over her shoes. It made me shudder, and I thought: oh no, she’ll be teased. But what happened was that one of her friends got drunk and tore off the roses.’
‘It was to accentuate the legs,’ I tell Charles, ‘that’s why we rolled our socks over our shoes.’
He contributes by telling us that as a child he could not stay away from his sister’s dress-up dolls. He loved them. Then I tell them about a boy I know, who spends all his time cutting bridal dresses out of magazines. Charles says he could have been that boy.
But back to the shoes.
Until my mum got too busy and too tired, she was elegant and always wore powder, rouge, lipstick, had pencilled eyebrows, mascara and eyeshadow. I seem to remember her saying ‘the idea of being poor and forced to wear dresses made of cheap synthetic material in ugly patterns is an outrage’ on more than one occasion (but
at least once when we left the department store Illums Bolighus with a rustle of shopping bags, I had ten new dresses, one for each day of the trip to the Black Sea), ‘the idea of being poor and forced to wear dresses of cheap synthetic material from Daells Varehus is an outrage’.
The demand for beauty. The beauty of clothes. The beauty of the home. Perhaps the beauty of the face and the body too. The absence of beauty – a pit of self-loathing. She herself had impressed the demand for beauty on me. And she herself abided by it until she grew too tired and abandoned it, and why should she continue to be subjugated to the convention of being a ‘lady’… personally it makes me think of how bored I get at the hairdresser’s, how beauty care and painting my toenails in the summer bore me something fierce, still I take vanity for what vanity is – but it gradually demands less of me. Incidentally the longing to win back her beauty has not entirely released its grip on her, the other day she said to me: ‘It’s ridiculous, but I still think that if I can just lose some weight, I will be very attractive again.’
I recall an evening many years earlier, in the kitchen at her parents’ place, late at night; we had left the loft bedroom we were sharing, and had gone down to the kitchen to grab a snack and take it up to the room. She bent over a piece of bread and spread a quintuple thick layer of butter on top, ‘This will give the Heart Foundation something to think about,’ she said.
The summer I met Charles, I went to visit my mum at her summerhouse by bike, and when I was going to cycle home, my chain fell off. My mum stood ready to wave, at the garden gate. I did not want my dress to get covered in oil so I pulled it off and fiddled with the chain in my knickers and bra. For me there is nothing worse than objects that are meant to fit together, I can still hear my dad’s voice (from my childhood) ‘Now try to look after it,’ and back then I went all empty inside or was filled with rage, and it’s still like that. On my knees on the lawn with the oily chain in my hands, I remembered an issue of Playboy that a man from the United Arab Emirates – who during mine and Alma’s trip to Turkey followed us halfway across the country by bus, and along the way a large taciturn character in a yellow sweater joined him, then there were two who disembarked when we disembarked, and checked in at the same hotel or guest house as us and each morning sat waiting for us in the reception without knowing where the day and we would take them, a journey, you might say, in the spirit of Sophie Calle – showed us (sniggering), featuring Le Pen’s former wife, Pierrette Le Pen, pictured in a series of cleaning scenarios, undressed, naturally, I remember in particular one image where she was scrubbing the toilet, kneeled down in front of it, with her arm down the toilet bowl and, it seemed to me, her head halfway down as well, in the toilet, from where she sent the beholder a flirtatious-lusty gaze, her breasts pressed against the toilet bowl, embodying the fantasy: the crawling maid, everything, that is the entire photo session, because Le Pen in an interview with Playboy had stated that if Pierrette could not manage on her own, then she should live off her lover or take on a cleaning job, and subsequently she and a camera crew from Playboy staged these photos.
Then the neighbour came over to gossip. The two women stood looking at my work on the chain, I apologized for my attire to the neighbour, sweating and beside myself, even though it was not my fault that she had barged her way into our garden. And my mum said something along the lines of we were after all women. The neighbour must have left when (glancing at me) she said: ‘Now that you’ve found yourself an older man, you no longer have to be so perfect either.’
She had said something similar once… I had been ill, my skin was spotty, and my hair was flat and lifeless, and maybe it was meant as a comfort when she (laconically) said that it was better to have been beautiful once than to never have been. A despondent remark in a despondent past participle from someone extolling thirsting for demanding beauty. From someone who always found comfort in beauty.
‘And that time Alma showed up in a pair of jeans that had fuck me, baby written on them. I had a former patient over for coffee for the first time, and I very nearly fell out of my chair.’
Charles nods. He is lying on the floor. She is lying on the sofa. My two fallen warriors. They both have bad backs, they have brittle bones, they are heavy smokers, and her back has collapsed because of bone metastasis whose development has temporarily been halted with the aid of Tamoxifen. In addition she also has degenerative joint disease. And sciatica. But she takes nothing stronger than paracetamol for the pain. She does not want to grow listless and lose clarity and the ability to read. Her greatest horror is that something will happen to her eyes so that she can no longer read. Charles has two unsuccessful back operations behind him. And in addition two failed attempts at regulating his heart rhythm with the help of a couple of proper electric shocks. Next to the two lying here I feel like a kind of floating fairy, very light, pain-free. Quite simply very young, even though I am not. (As if I am their child.) But I am also in the possession of, for the time being, a physical form that is not under attack, and my pulse is regular. Status report complete. Sometimes it is completely exhausting to be around them. One Christmas Eve, we had made it through dinner and presents, the two of them lying down as always, myself sitting, and we were now watching a film, Delicatessen. I did not find it interesting, I was quite simply exhausted, so I excused myself and climbed into bed with The Alexandria Quartet (to travel somewhere where everything is saturated with meaning, friendships, love affairs, the view of the world, the language. That saturation has contributed to my idea of how everything should be. I think so. I have been reading The Alexandria Quartet for the past thirty years, often only a couple of random pages, I know the books so well that I immediately know where I have landed, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea. And Pursewarden and Darley and Nessim and Narouz. And Melissa – with the flat scissor-shaped thighs.
Justine looks in the mirror and says: ‘Tiresome pretentious hysterical Jewess that you are!’
And Pursewarden (author): ‘I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind.’
The duck hunt. The masquerade ball. The intelligence officers. The fast rides through the desert. The secret lodge. The alchemist Capodistria who is successful in creating four homunculi, a king, a queen and a red and blue spirit in bottles. The king breaks free and attempts to get in with the queen, his small nails clawing at the bottle. Capodistria gets some ugly scratches that will not heal when he attempts to capture him. I once launched myself into a comprehensive study of the alchemists due to this scene alone.
And here Darley is speaking: ‘Like the dead Pursewarden I hoped I might soon be truthfully able to say: I do not write for those who have never asked themselves this question: at what point does real life begin?’
And finally, Darley on his relationship to Justine: ‘Possession is on the other hand too strong: we were human beings not Brontë cartoons.’
Lawrence Durrell, the author of The Alexandria Quartet, did not get in to Cambridge, he applied several times, but was rejected, reportedly because he was terrible at maths. The composition of the tetralogy is based on Einstein, it is an attempt to convert a mathematical theory, the theory of relativity, into language, three of the works are an expression of space, and one of time, ‘the soup-mix recipe of continuum’.
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