— Colette, Sido
Occasionally she complains that she has not created something lasting; here she is not thinking of fiction, but of research into depression. Then I remind her of all the gifts she has received from her patients over the years. And she replies that the only thing she has done has been to listen and never judge.
I am just like her in that regard, in that I have chosen a different path from my parents; I pushed off with my arms and dragged the rest of my body over the vaulting horse – she left behind sailors and housewives, me, a crystal decanter on a mahogany sideboard in a sitting room with a desolate gleam and the bourgeoisie precept that if something has not been noticed, it has not existed. They did not anticipate my intelligence, my dad thought that at most I would be able to manage a hotel, but would most probably end up at an ironmonger’s; my grandma asked me straight up if getting my foot in the door at Danish State Railways was something that would interest me. She could not drop the idea of me in uniform (back then green-brown) behind the counter in the dining car. They do not know who I am. Can I choose to have Camilla’s mum as my own? (And what about her dad… he is gentle and good at protecting himself. He has what must be one of the most beautiful gardens in Copenhagen; every single centimetre is in bloom; a gentle person in a beautiful garden.)
Camilla is, with her voracious appetite for literature, a kind of copy of her mum. Often when I come to visit, they are in the middle of a conversation, sitting at either end of the sofa, under the same plaid blanket. (I have keys and let myself in while I announce myself with a ‘cuck-oo.’) They look up. They welcome me. They do seem happy to see me. But they are far away – in each other. The living room seems charged. Yes, that’s right: I am jealous. Of both of them.
‘Your mum said: “When I’m no longer here, you can write anything you like about me.”’
‘But I don’t think she means that,’ Camilla answered. ‘She also once said to me that even though we are getting along with each other now, you should remember that it has not always been like that.’
‘I remember – it was when the three of us were at the summerhouse together, and I had sat writing in the annexe all morning and came in to see you – her studying me and said: “It’s not that writing is going to make you outright ugly, I can’t say that, but something is happening to your face.” I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, and it was true. My face appeared dissolved and tired – from the effort of collecting something from deep within and bringing it out; the digging through all the layers of time’.
I happened to visit OF. Not in his home, but at the hospital where he lay with ruined lungs, from all his smoking; it was a couple of weeks before he died. The suit was replaced by a pair of green pyjamas. By the way the nurses treated him, it was apparent that he had worked up a personal relationship to every single one of them. One smoothed his duvet, and another one sat down for a moment on the edge of his bed and held his hand.
For a long time he had not been able to walk more than a couple of steps without having to stop and gasp for air. On these stuttering walks I used to pretend that I was terribly interested in something or other, a shop window or a tree, and stop and look at it in order to give him the opportunity to catch his breath. He saw right through me.
I had published my first book, and he was proud of me. I don’t think he ever read it, but he clipped out every single line he could find about me in the newspapers and magazines, and sent them to me.
WEDDING
[Alma]
As soon as the final note had sounded, his cousins and other male relatives grabbed Kristian and lifted him high into the air where he screamed and thrashed about (if he had fallen on the stone floor, and cracked his head open, I think his blood would have looked like fish or poultry blood, thin and bluish, with a cold foul smell), while a couple of others tore his shoes off his flailing feet and cut holes in his socks as per tradition. I could no longer think of him as man. I was happy that Charles immediately turned his back on the situation; that he did not contribute to his degradation. There was something about the way his back billowed in the air that made him insect-like.
I had really gone all out. I had got a French manicure, had my hair and make-up done – I removed the make-up at the last moment, the Polish make-up artist had made my face look like a heavy, dead (and rather Eastern European) mask consisting of a thick layer of shiny powder, light-purple lipstick; it was liberating to watch it run down the drain. For a long time I hoped we could avoid the bridal waltz. I have never been able to memorize sequences of movements as such. But Kristian’s mum insisted. She arrived with a CD in her bag and tried to help us, at home in the living room. But she could not get through to me. I decided on lessons with a professional. The woman at the dance school could have been a man. Built like a dockworker, this dance robot. Arms covered in long black hair, she tugged and towed me about. If she had been one of the marathon dancers in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, she would have lasted a long time. The floor – like a fifth element, which let us sway, let us glide, let us breathe. Many lessons later I thought that something near perfection had been achieved, and I wished that she could replace Kristian, just on the big day, during the terrifying minutes it takes the waltz to sentimentalize through time; a melody full of stops and starts, like someone carrying a wardrobe and constantly having to put it down, dragging it for a bit instead. The bridal dance is bittersweet, a frightful word, intimating that peaks follow valleys, but valleys follow peaks again.
On the big day someone had let the dance go on for what felt like an eternity.
‘Now we’ll forget everything,’ he said and started to bounce – easy for him to say, I was the one who had taken lessons. As if from the outset there had been an understanding that I was the hopeless one. While the guests came closer and closer, clapping, I thought of a novel by Alistair MacLean (I loved him when I was very young, oh Ice Station Zebra), where the criminals have ended up in a field, in Poland or maybe in the Ukraine, back then the breadbaskets of the world, it was harvest and the harvesters (wearing national dress? All very authentic, quasi-fascistic) close in on the culprits and make a ring around them, with their harvest tools stretched out, scythes and forks, and do away with them, infinitely slowly, in a kind of stomping forward march, chopping, at the ground, the blood, the corn. Our guests had only their hands, and their palms echoed through the air.
In the end, when the guests had closed in around us to hide the sight of us from the world, and there was good reason for that, I placed my arms around Kristian’s neck and, still bouncing, buried my head in his shoulder. But what use is that on such a day when you are more dress than person. When it was finally over, I fled to the garden. And I was almost unable to bring myself to return to the party, that’s how embarrassed I was.
THE WORLD’S GO-GO POLE
[Camilla]
I need to keep my mind active, give it something to work on, just like you use prayer beads or knitting needles to prevent your hands from becoming pendulums that heavily and resignedly pull the body down or on the contrary swing into the air or rub and pick and chewing gum for the mouth, otherwise it (the mind) fiddles with catastrophes the outcome of which always results in coffins or in any case deathbeds or farewell letters, immensely trivial, but for that reason no less troublesome. I can get so consumed by an idea that I do not pay attention to where I am going, but accidentally run a red light and have to get off my bike and walk, but still one of these imaginary catastrophes has not led to a real one. It is normally only some ways into the catastrophe that I realize that I am in the midst of it, then I say ‘stop,’ but a moment later I am caught up in a new catastrophe. Perhaps catastrophe is too big a word when only one person dies at a time. But the person who dies – it is catastrophic for me. (I once talked to a psychologist about it, and she said that a person should not think that way. But I do. And there we foundered. Death cannot be plucked out with a pair of tweezers.)
It is
the people I care for that my thoughts subject to disasters. Those whom I would hate to lose most of all, Charles, my mum, Alma. Or myself, writing goodbye to one of the three, as I find myself on the day of judgement, summing up what we’ve had together, a long thank you. (How daft. How pathetic.)
I think there was one time where instead I imagined that I saved people from drowning and from terrorists in planes while I sprang from seat to seat; civilization’s two possibilities: hero or victim. But the heroic era is presumably past, replaced by departure and the final farewell. What can this mire be traced back to? Have I once, for a rather long time, felt under threat; so that one wall of my cranium is built of fear of loss, and the consciousness, in a kind of pleading gesture, has to play ball (catastrophes) against it with an endless bonk bonk; who knows, but it is exhausting, and at times I would happily exchange my head with someone else’s, but of course I could end up with something worse, like for example the voice that periodically tells Charles that he is no good at anything, then I’d rather have deathbeds, thank you, oh generous allocator of unpleasantness.
Late in the summer when I returned to Copenhagen after several months in the country everything seemed rich and beautiful and immense. I saw the world as a platter, the elements arranged / numerous and varied, so many types shapes colours, so many moods, so many possibilities. I felt good, better than I had in a long time. Everything became clear, radiant, practically gleaming. At first it was lovely, then it was as though any object that my eyes happened to fall upon, or which entered my field of vision, made unreasonable demands on my attention. I had to stare. I simply could not stop. And even if it was a familiar object (a lamp at home, a pylon somewhere, with this continuous sound of water across its straddling leg), it was as though I had never seen it before. If I looked down for a moment and then observed it again, it was (again) completely new. It was tiring. I felt like going into hibernation. But it was demanded of me, all manner of things required my attention.
During a bout of staring I realized that in order for something to be completely new all the time, it (also) had to constantly be destroyed. Death birth death birth, so to speak. The way the death of something then takes form. Visibly, in the blink of an eye. Logical madness.
And thus I ended up where I always end, on the dreary topic of death. Why can I not stop myself. I no longer want to twist everything around the subject of death as though it were the world’s go-go pole.
THE HAIR IN THE DRAWER
[Edward]
I asked the undertaker for a lock, but he took a scalp – judging by the thickness of the envelopes, closer to two scalps, a Native Indian with his own business. These envelopes lie in my chest of drawers, sharing the drawer with my socks and underwear, my hands find them when I rummage around inside; or I see a corner poking up, the escape of a white sail through black reefs (of socks and underpants). I have never again considered opening them. I once dared to peek inside, and there was plenty, overwhelming quantities of white rustling hair and the memory of the pink scalps (his was also spotted), and what it was like to stroke their hair, those dear old dogs. I am not in the habit of fetishizing. But am I not ascribing value and power to the hair in these envelopes… should it be called sentimental value? Should it be called the pars pro toto value? Should it just be called a dear memory? In any case I cannot bin it. My parents’ hair. It ought to have been burnt, along with them. Now I am left with it. It is a practical problem that I am confronted with. It is a long time since I clung to life by a thread, alone and forsaken, and called out to my parents, but then they had long since flown off to heaven, dogs have mercy on me.
Why I call them dogs: sitting here at my side, or rather slouched, just like its master (me), as always reflecting my state of mind, their young substitute, their replacement on the road of life, with a mouldy odour coming from its mouth, the little dog, the young dog that entered my life when they died/and left the world desolate, and in whose company I have walked away my grief for them while in some or other sense I always experienced it (the young dog) as their alter ego, reincarnation, ghost, a rutting version.
Of course I could just leave it (the hair) there, then someone in a hundred years will find the chest of drawers in a lumber room and open the drawer, and it might unfold for the person in question like it did in Guy de Maupassant’s short story ‘A Tress of Hair’ where a rich young man, a lover of beautiful things, finds in a piece of Venetian furniture from the seventeenth century, in a secret drawer, placed on a bed of velvet, an enormous and long light-haired plait. This young man already feels like this in advance:
‘The past attracts me, the present terrifies me because the future means death.’
So it suits his nature to begin to love the object of the past such as the hair is. He has the plait and conjures up the entire woman. He caresses it, sleeps with it, makes it his companion and takes it with him to the theatre whereby the trap snaps shut:
‘But they saw her… they guessed… they arrested me. They put me in prison like a criminal. They took her. Oh, misery!’
Before the young man finds the hair, the Venetian furniture seems irresistibly alluring, he has to own it. Personally I see my own light-blue, slightly heavy chest of drawers first and foremost as a practical arrangement, as a piece of furniture tasked with containing many things, also far too many, whose key often disappears, and whose small hinges hang and dangle and could use a few screws. My chest of drawers, this awkward enveloper of the hair, is of little attraction. I can certainly stay away from it. I am not drawn towards it and its wavy mess. But I can well imagine a man in the future, or a woman for that matter, finding these envelopes and falling in love with the contents, this twinned hair, white and rustling, and let it fall down over her face like a forgiving rain. Afterwards it might be difficult to pick it up again, my dear dogs had short hair, it is not like the long plait in the story, a single beautiful piece, but many small (pieces). Oh, all these locks. If the sensitive person wishes to repeat the action (let it rain down over the face) then he or she must first sweep up the hair and stuff it back in the yellowed brittle envelopes, and would the broom not kill the romance; but without the broom, with the romance the desire the love unchallenged, there can only be talk of a single meeting between face and hair. I imagine the entire thing taking place in an attic.
Camilla’s Indian friend is Sikh and keeps her hair covered. She is not allowed to cut it. Whatever she combs off or loses, she carefully burns. I no longer remember her explanation why, according to her religion, she has to do that, but I can ask again. In any case one day I visited Charles and Camilla, their Indian friend had stayed overnight at their place and had (obviously) just been in the shower and washed her hair. She sat in a small room behind the kitchen, Camilla’s study. She shouted ‘hi’ to me. ‘Hi,’ I shouted back. The door to the room was ajar. All the way along the kitchen counter, in the height between the kitchen cupboards and the kitchen counter, there are mirrors mounted. Camilla has for years talked about replacing them with tiles, because the mirrors constantly get stained with spray of water and grease and have to be polished. I sat in the kitchen with my back to the small room and facing the mirrors. In there I saw (suddenly) this secret hair. It was long and black and shiny, the owner shook her head as she brushed the hair, and the wonderful hair disappeared from the mirror and then reappeared. She knew that I was in the kitchen, that the door was ajar. But maybe she did not think about the mirrors. What more can I say other than: it was a beautiful sight. She is a slightly lean and yellowish and often afflicted person. I think that she showed me her hair. To rise in my esteem.
There are some, for example Alwilda, who think that I am a parent-lover, that I lived and continue to live in a symbiosis with the dear dogs, that I cannot cut the umbilical cord, and whatever else there are of strings and ties (around the neck, like millstones). To that I reply: ‘Alwilda and others! If that was the case, do you not think that I would constantly be poking my nose into the envelopes?
’
(Yes, yes, it is settled here.)
Then I did it all the same, I opened the envelopes, I defied the ban I had set for myself. And the affection almost knocked me out cold.
(‘Dog’ was a word to keep the longing at bay, cynical from kyon, dog, right?)
I could not stand it and tried to tell myself: Paul Celan’s mum’s hair, for example, was never allowed to turn white, pull yourself together.
(Then I heard my psychologist’s voice: Now give yourself permission to be in the feeling, Edward.
The psychologist’s utopia: a mind in unison.
According to him (my psychologist), a person ought to start to see a psychologist soon after birth, in order to get a running start; avoid blockages, accumulations; the psychologist as a chimney sweep, equipped with a long pipe or is it a large brush, to knock out the soot. Apropos outfits, the other day I had to call for ‘the wasp man’ to get him to remove a large wasp’s nest, and he arrived, wearing a white silky full-body outfit with collars and an incredible tool wound around the arm, extremely mythological, if only I could say he had met the chimney sweep on the way out.)
NOT DIVIDING, SUBDIVIDING
[Alma]
Standing on the threshold of a new relationship (Edward) I want to try to explain why I ended up having to leave Kristian. I was thirty-five, and my nature had by that point long since forced his nature into a corner. I felt like I was a sack of sand, dry all the way through, ready to be thrown onto a lorry and driven away. We had each entrenched ourselves in our own end of the flat. In the middle was the bedroom with the marital bed which we still shared, and where we met around midnight, each arriving from our own domain. We pulled out our ear plugs from the pillows (small nasty fiddly orange things, Camilla’s mum once called them dwarf dicks, ‘no, what did I say,’ she said straight after with a simultaneously delighted and appalled laugh) and twisted them into place so the other person’s sleep or sleeplessness would not disturb. Kristian hopped into bed wearing woollen socks, for the sake of his health, it made his legs look like saplings, rising up from these woollen boats.
Companions Page 24