Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  The existence of an absolute unique frame of references is rejected; all depending on where the events in the books are seen from, they appear different.

  But that is not what makes one’s hair curl – that happens when Balthazar drops Narouz’s harpoon gun in the water and the harpoon goes off just as Clea has dived down to the wreck, and her hand is riveted to the spot in the depths so Darley has to get a knife from the cabin and dive down and cut off her hand – in order to bring her back alive from the bottom of the sea. And when Amaril tears off Semira’s mask and sees that she has no nose, it has been eaten away, and proposes to her on the spot and decides to create a new nose for her, he is a doctor, in fact a gynaecologist, but he launches into a complex plastic surgery, Clea has designed the nose, and the following year it grows on Semira’s face, and she is ready to stand before Alexandria after spending most of her life hidden in a dark room because of the darkness of her face, it might be said, and the majority of Alexandria’s high society are present when she dances into the hall with her doctor) and left them to each other, I could not manage for a moment longer to be the one they both knew best, with both of them at the same time; it felt as though they each had to be given extra consideration, even more than when I had them on their own.

  It can be difficult to manage, both taking care of the practical matters and sitting down with them and listening and talking – without thinking of what I have to do for them afterwards. At times my mum complains of me being distracted, that I am not really present. It is difficult to concentrate on a conversation – sitting across from a face writhed in pain, a person attempting to find a slightly better body position, at the same time as she and he, because they both do it, insist on conversing, to think of something other than the pain. At the same time – I don’t know what word to use – I admire (but that sounds too distanced) them for it while my-heart-bleeds.

  Charles seemed to have the idea that I could manage everything. Gradually as my mum lost her grip on things, Charles and I took responsibility for the care of her summerhouse, yes I make it sound like an estate, though it is very small. But the large shady trees and white benches transformed the garden into a park.

  Charles had arranged to have a couple of the mighty huge trees felled in order to create more light. As per his request, the gardeners had chipped the trees and left the wood chips behind. There must have been ten to fifteen tonnes. Charles envisaged that the chips would be used to fill the craters left by the trees. The previously wild and soughing location looked like a lunar landscape. I dragged my garden chair up onto a mound of chips and burst into tears. Charles put his hand on my shoulder and told me he envisioned that I would take a shovel and start to level the large property – and fill it up with wood chips. That might take years. I had other things to do.

  But he took pity on me. Or I refused to grasp the shovel – or live with the sight of the barren brown parcel of land. The gardeners returned riding a huge machine. And it was levelled. And grass was sown. And then we had a big green plot of lawn, as flat as a pancake. My mum thinks it is boring.

  ‘Men love felling trees,’ I say; I am standing with my neighbour on the shiny coin that the garden now is.

  ‘Yes,’ she says brightening up, ‘I was always disagreeing with my husband about that too. He loved chopping down trees. But I preferred to keep them.’

  She looks at me with an expression of superior knowledge, and we allow ourselves a moment of unfathomable oversimplification and share a brief Freudian moment in the garden. A rare moment of agreement. She, the neighbour, often comes running to meet us when we arrive at the summerhouse and follows us into the garden and points at places of decline: ‘Such a pity,’ she says, ‘look, such a pity.’

  One day when my mum sat in her flat in the city centre, she had begun to long for the sea. She walked down to Nørreport Station and caught the train to Hillerød, and from there she continued to Hundested. (Several years earlier Mogens had been aboard his icebreaker in Hundested Havn, and she had visited him on this icebreaker.) There is an estate agency next to Hundested Station, a Dan Bolig, and displayed in the window was a small thatched house with a vast garden. It reminded her of the (thatched) home of her childhood. Instead of going to the sea she opened the door to the agency and drove out to the summerhouse with the estate agent. It was close to the fjord. She took me with her a couple of days later so I could see it before she made up her mind.

  She had made up her mind. She told the estate agent about the seamen in her family. She said that she thought only sailors were real men.

  The estate agent nodded. He concurred. I squirmed like an eel because she talked too much, made wild associations, like I was ten years old again, and pouted like I was ten years old, and said grumpily that the house was far too small. They did not hear me. They talked about men as they signed. The estate agent’s partner was an able seaman.

  ‘This is a paradise,’ I have said that to her countless times later (and been happy that I failed as a guardian that day; so that she got her house).

  The red shoes make me think that my mum has joined ‘the cheap synthetic materials’ camp, so to speak, even though the sandals are made of suede. And even though she has not become poor. On the contrary she receives a good pension. But she has been close to dying, and ‘when you have been licked by the Crab, a lot of things stop being important. Can’t you understand that?’

  She had almost given up, she has moved countless times (that is, seven), scattered her furniture to the four winds, given almost everything away, ‘so you’re not left with all that,’ for my sake at that, even though I protested madly at these disposals and wished she had abided by the convention of ‘a beautiful home’ and not replaced the beautiful heavy furniture with wicker ‘because it is easier to manage’, but then she placed beautiful little objects, knick-knacks rocks candles flowers within her field of vision and let her gaze be drawn by them.

  How many times have I thought that if she hadn’t moved out of the flat in Jægersborg she’d lived in for twenty-five years all of this relocating might never have started?

  CAN I APPROPRIATE HER MUM?

  [Alma]

  OF would do anything for us. But it was difficult to get the opportunity to do something for him. He lived entrenched. You could not ring him. He could only make outgoing calls with his phone. At least that’s what he claimed. Maybe he just did not pick up the phone when it rang, or he lived with the cord unplugged. And he would never have visitors at his flat. He did not think it was nice enough. It had to be redecorated first. But that never happened. He stalled us, year after year. Camilla’s mum was allowed to visit him once. It was a bachelor pad, there were a couple of bikes in the shower cubicle. On one occasion I made it as far as his front door, I rang and rang, there was something I had to tell him, but the door did not open, I left a message. When the flap of the letterbox slammed shut, and my note fluttered onto the floor of his entrance – I didn’t know whether he stood there, as still as a grave. But I don’t think so.

  I had dropped by because I had written a play, a monologue, it was the first time I had written something that long, for six weeks I had worked in a rapture, and now I was finished. I strode from my flat to his, and my head was singing, ‘Here comes success, here comes success / Oh hooray success, hooray success.’

  He had to hear that I had finished it – that I had created a wonderful piece of work. And he had to help me figure out what to do with it. Where I should send it. I knew he knew a publisher. I envisaged that my monologue would be published in book form. I was not particularly interested in theatre. For a brief time I had thought I would become an actor, and Camilla’s mum had arranged for some private lessons with a director. I thought I had seen tears glimmer in her (the director’s) eyes when I embodied Portia in her sitting room (wearing a red dress with a wide gloss belt and white boots that went high up my thighs, more Pretty Woman than Portia; when we reached the court scene, she pulled a tremendous piece of fa
bric out of a commode, and draped it over my shoulders as a cape), and even though the tears made me proud, I quickly lost interest. Camilla’s mum thought that the main reason I accepted the lessons was in order to boost my self-confidence. (I had a hard time opening my mouth at large gatherings, my group at university was so big that we sat on the floor and in the windowsills; the one time I said something, I got so embarrassed that I raced out of the room immediately after. I had a high and thin voice, Camilla’s mum often encouraged me to ‘turn up the bass’, and when I said something, people turned around to see who the strange voice belonged to. I had recurring ear infections as a child, and once an ear-nose-throat-doctor said at the sound of my voice: ‘There is no way anyone can have a voice like that,’ my parents were with me, neither of them protested, I had once heard my mum say that I sounded like the kind of toy that peeps when you squeeze it, why would she defend her peeping mouse?)

  The monologue was about a man who was so afraid to die that he wanted to be stuffed: ‘in order to be in the world, without being of the world.’ He had already killed and stuffed his friend. The monologue was addressed to her and to a stuffed bird that had obviously inspired this human stuffing.

  OF made an appointment with the publisher. But before that I had an appointment set up with one of Camilla’s mum’s former patients who was an author. (Camilla’s mum was my second mum, I ate at their place at least once a week, and once I had a falling out with my own mum, I moved in with them and stayed there for six months.) I was allowed to meet him at his home. I was so nervous that I knocked over an entire jug of juice. We sat in his kitchen. When I was finished reading, I hardly dared to look up.

  Lengthy silence.

  ‘You must have really suffered,’ he then said.

  I did not know if that was good or bad. And he said nothing more. I started to feel like a patient.

  ‘It’s either brilliant, or else it does not work at all,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe it’s somewhere in between,’ he said kindly (but I did not believe it). I scraped up my papers. The consultation was over.

  OF and I met at the corner so we would arrive at the publisher’s together. I had a bad feeling straight away. OF appeared drunk, and we had barely got through the door at the publisher’s, before he pulled a couple of bottles of wine out of his shopping trolley and placed them on the table in front of us. First they talked about old times, OF’s life had ground to a stop, the publisher was an active person, OF was stuck in the past. Then OF began to sing my praises, not mentioning my monologue, but my appearance and my nature, and it became clear that he did not think my monologue would suffice on its own, I had to be part of the transaction. We were here to sell me. The publisher squirmed in his seat and finally said politely: ‘We have to watch out that I don’t fall head over heels for Alma.’ I squirmed. OF persisted. OF drank and with each long gulp his praise grew more fulsome, his final trick was to grab the publisher’s hand with one hand and mine with the other and try to hitch our hands. We resisted his efforts, and after leaving my monologue Satan and All His Pomp on the table I dragged OF away, two sheets to the wind, got him on a bus and stood watching him and his bag practically slalom down the centre of the bus. And nobody wanted my monologue, neither the publisher nor Radioteatret nor any other theatres. But obviously it was not OF’s fault. For a long time, maybe for a couple of years, I read it to anyone I could get to listen.

  Telling Camilla’s mum about the incident was completely out of the question, even though OF belonged to her, so to speak, since he was originally her friend, and they were much closer in age than OF and I; the incident included alcohol and (an invitation for) sex; elements of mine and Camilla’s life that she – Mum – had no access to. Even though we were grown up and had long since moved away from home. Then I happen to think of how we used to sip from the bottles of liqueur and other alcohol she had before we would go out dancing and cavorting, at the age of fourteen or fifteen at Tophat in Bakken in our white trousers that we put on wet to make them more clingy. When Bakken closed at midnight we rode home through Dyrehaven on our bikes, and if we heard bikers approaching on their motorcycles, we hopped off our bikes and hid in a ditch (lights off and hearts, mine at least, pounding).

  She would only have one drink when there were guests over, she had no drinks cabinet, the bottles were kept at the bottom of the kitchen cupboard, gathering dust, because they had been there for years. When we arrived, the contents of the bottles quickly disappeared. To conceal our boozing we topped them up with water. Until the time Camilla’s mum poured something for a guest that was so diluted, practically water, that we were exposed. She (Camilla’s mum) speaks impeccably. The sentences leave her mouth fully formed, no hesitating, no repetitions. Her speech is like elegant handwriting. I like to imagine that I have spent so much time with her (from the age of four) that she has contributed considerably to my linguistic development. When I say something ambiguous, she forces me to be more precise. They say it takes three generations to create a gentleman. Her father wrote, though was never published. She wrote when she was young. She had poems and short stories appear in Vild Hvede in the fifties. She had shown them to me; she had lost her own copies, but OF found them at the library and photocopied them for her, here is one of them, she was nineteen:

  ASHES

  I rest at your feet like a pile of ashes,

  consumed by the fervent flames of love,

  whilst the bliss of our embrace slowly fades.

  Before this I was a child, now I am a woman,

  and the wonder has happened on this night,

  sculpted by your strong hand and flaming mouth.

  We knelt before our god of love

  and quenched our thirst at love’s fountain –

  the wondrous water, which induces thirst.

  I thank you, my beloved, for

  you woke me and crowned my brow

  with the gold and rubies of love.

  Viggo F. Møller invited her to a restaurant in Tivoli to celebrate her debut in Vild Hvede, and at the restaurant she had to brush his hand off her thigh. They ate open prawn sandwiches, and out of ignorance she sprinkled salt on her prawns and was informed that only pepper is to be used with prawns, and felt socially inadequate. She went red from head to toe. Had he kept quiet, maybe she would have been able to enjoy everything – her debut, her notion of a future as a poet, the day, the prawn sandwiches, the distinguished company – had he been better able to cope with rejection; had he been more magnanimous that day.

  She went so far into her notion of becoming an author that she abandoned her medical studies and sold her textbooks. She sat down and tried to write for fourteen days; but nothing came to her. She thought she had to come up with something. She arrived at the conclusion that she lacked any imagination. She bought back her medical textbooks, poetry turned into terrible limericks like this one by her private tutor: ‘On the valvula Bauhini / the final villus stands / waving at the faeces / which near the anus lands.’

  At parties the male students hung up huge pairs of knickers and bras on washing lines along with inflated condoms and displayed organs and body parts embalmed in formaldehyde which they cheerfully dropped their cigarettes in with a hideous smell the result, all very cringeworthy.

  She has scarcely written since the fifties. If I am considered her daughter, it could be noted that it has taken three generations to create an author. Instead she has this consummate elocution (which my writing has grown out of), which is conveyed by a voice whose tonal range seems enormous, from dark to tremendously bright and all the tones in between.

  One afternoon she looked up from Colette’s Sido and said: ‘Maybe you’ll write a book like this about me one day.’

  She said it shyly, or modestly. The desire by those who do not write for a memento in words. An illam vixisse, ‘this woman has lived’ (as Roland Barthes designates it in Mourning Diary. I don’t know if his mam (what he calls his mum) had a need to be written about. But he h
ad a need to write about her, an illam vixisse.

  When Edward called his notes about his mourning over his parents’ death Mourning Diary, he was not aware of Barthes’ diary. He first heard about it a couple of weeks ago. He ran out and bought it straight away. Now we have all read it.)

  ‘One day’ pointed towards the time after her death. It sounded like when she talked about her career, her contribution, and with raised eyebrows intended to give the statement an element of self-deprecation she said: ‘I ought to be dined at the archeion – that was a way to honour Athenians in antiquity, to invite them to dinner at the town hall, to be dined at the archeion.’

  Back to Sido, Colette’s mother. A mild woman in a large and lush garden places her hand under the chin of a flower and says something beautiful. She loved her flowers so much that she would not give them away for funerals:

  ‘No. Nobody condemned my roses to die with Mr Enfert.’

  — Colette, Sido

  At times I think that Camilla’s mum still envisages and hopes that she will become a writer. Like Colette’s father hoped throughout his life. After his death, this was discovered in his library:

  ‘Two hundred, three hundred, one hundred and fifty pages per volume; beautiful ribbed kraft paper, luscious and soft as cream, or thick exercise paper, meticulously trimmed, hundreds and hundreds of blank pages…’