Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Money sex services, by that I mean housework, in my opinion ought to flow freely between us. But it did not, everything became part of a rigid system, everything had to be agreed, subdivided, planned so that his shed of an ego would not come crashing down. (Near the end we went to bed together every Thursday at six o’clock sharp. Like during the Christmas armistice in 1914 where Germans, Brits and the French celebrated Christmas Eve together, we each dragged ourselves out of our trenches and met in bed, I, the mean one, possibly the German. Quite a few people write about sex as though straight out of a manual, or like grocery bills where numbers are replaced by limbs, rather tedious, you can imagine a meal described with the same circumstantiality, knife and fork, mouth and food actants, or an interior during a storm, but that already sounds like more fun. I will be content to say that these Thursday afternoons were delightful for a long time, and that I could have wanted it also to take place Monday Saturday Wednesday Sunday Friday.) I have often fallen for men whom I thought had a big soul. Whatever I mean by that. I should have gone for something easier to measure or weigh (the pocketbook? But I have never considered that I would not take care of myself).

  I don’t know how often over time I have confused soul with peculiarity or eccentricity or idiosyncrasies or neuroses or compulsory behaviour or low low self-esteem. The other day I had coffee with a childhood sweetheart (Peter), who after having completed his training at the conservatory left music to become a postman. For two full tedious hours (four cups of coffee) he inveighed against all the music he could think of, it could burn in hell as far as he was concerned. For a moment I was sent fifteen years back in time and I remembered how I once had taken a cauliflower and thrown it out his window, an absurd gesture of powerlessness at the crushing of everything I listened to. Just as long as Edward does not… just as long as Edward is as stable and normal as he seems. After Kristian I want a man without frills, like rye bread, like a blue sky. But I always want something intense, something toppling that makes the soul turn and turn.

  Edwards sends an apologetic smile to the gravestone if he does not stop by the grave when we cross the cemetery. But he is now able to not stop. (Maybe I fell in love with Kristian simply because he is a doctor like Camilla’s mum.)

  A TEA PARTY (AROUND CHARLES’S BED)

  [All of the companions]

  ‘Would anyone care to hear a brief anecdote about the small dog and a crow?’ Edward asks, ‘yesterday morning near the entrance to Fælledparken a crow was pecking at a plastic tray that had contained minced beef. The small dog raced towards the crow and chased it away. It investigated the packaging. It was clearly empty. It raised its hind leg and urinated on it and then ran off. The crow hopped back, took the packaging in its beak and shook off the urine and began to peck at it again.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘It urinates on everything it doesn’t want for itself, even bread, in order to prevent others from getting it.’

  ‘The scorched earth policy.’

  ‘Nah, the irrigated.’

  ‘I have been out mating. Again,’ Alwilda says, ‘and this time I believe it, that there is growth in my uterus. May I please have an extra chair, so I can keep my legs up.’

  ‘Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of organic juice.’

  ‘I had considered Kristian. But the idea of him recognising his son and entering the picture. Better to choose someone outside of my territory, foreign lions, from the other side of town, I thought, and took four different men in a row, stretch and bend. I want three (in time), two sons and a daughter who will come bing bang bong, the diaper stage over in a hurry. Their first words will be “toi-let”. They will go to a strict school in the north, and I will cycle them there in a carrier bike, in all sorts of weather, all the way along Østerbrogade, along the railway by Ryvangs Allé, they will be waving from the carrier, and the passengers on the train will wave back. Mum spurts ahead and overtakes the train. Fit as a postman – in advance. They will learn Chinese at school, and I am a Chinese mother. I no longer have time to work, pant pant, but there is no father, so I will have to. Maybe I will hitch the four possible fathers to the Chinese cart, better to have four possible fathers than one impossible, in the year of the dragon, then we can spend the rest of our life guessing, four possible fathers for each little Chinese person, my twelve men, three children and I all sit around guessing, “you,” Chang says and climbs on the lap of the Native American from Nordvest,’ Alwilda says.

  ‘You’re mad as a March hare.’

  ‘Why did that make you shudder, Edward?’

  ‘In my scheme of things, “Native American” is another term for “undertaker”,’ Edward answers.

  ‘Very personal, very hermetic.’

  ‘My self-loathing is like a ram, it can break the door down. Yesterday I woke up with the following image: me skiing in shit, swooshing down a hill, with shit spraying around the poles. So the tone for the day is set,’ Kristian says.

  ‘Apropos self-image, apropos shit,’ Edward says, ‘then you might consider the effect it has on a dog watching its master bend over its excrements and pick them up in a bag.’

  ‘Such lavatorial company,’ Alma says.

  ‘Then let’s take a round: What is consuming you at the moment, how are you keeping yourselves busy?’

  ‘Then the sentence is pronounced. There is nothing to be done about my back. Everything has been tried. Now it’s time to give up,’ says Charles.

  ‘It really pains me to hear that,’ Camilla’s mum says.

  ‘Then there is only one way – the way of the pilgrim, to the holy baths, the holy baths,’ Camilla says.

  ‘Yes. I will let my body sink into Lourdes,’ Charles says, ‘and hope for a miracle.’

  ‘I’ll go with you as a helper and photographer,’ Camilla says.

  (Charles says nothing.)

  ‘Oh, can’t we all go with you?’

  (Charles says nothing.)

  ‘I want to be part of the Arab Spring. I long for something greater than myself. I will pitch my tent on a square, starve and strive, die so that it matters,’ Kristian says.

  ‘And give you not all, then know you nothing given,’ Camilla’s mum says, ‘that’s how I was raised.’

  ‘Raised to sink,’ Camilla says.

  ‘Tell me,’ Camilla’s mum says to Charles, ‘have you ever tasted Peking duck in sweet-and-sour sauce? I can really recommend that.’

  ‘Morning in the garden,’ Camilla says, ‘everything wakes up, everything glitters, shines, crows and is wet and beaming.’

  ‘Yes, here at the house there are so many insects. There are clothes moths, spiders, and of course flies. And moths, the carrions of the micro world, light hunters, with their spotted wings like the one that drowned in the kitchen sink just before, a goshawk in miniature.’

  ‘The other day I met someone unforgettable in Østre Anlæg,’ Kristian says, ‘she sat on the bottom step of a staircase, with her face hidden in her hands and under a large head of hair. She was young and slender and tall. She wore a pair of cheap white strap sandals that sooner belonged to a grandmother, out in the country, or that you would be able to find among a child’s costume – and it made me think that she was Eastern European – and a long skirt and a short white top. I asked if I could help her, but she did not react. In front of her on the ground was a filled plastic bag, not a purse, but a firmly stuffed bag.

  “Won’t you look up,” I asked, “so I can see if you need help?”

  But she did not react. And because she did not raise her head so I could see her face, I started to imagine this face, that the eyes were ruined, that I would have screamed if she had removed her hands and thrown her hair back, that she would have had empty eye sockets or a dead gaze, while what I would have seen, probably, was complete surrender, a knowledge of being beyond help.

  “It’s all right,” an old lady at the top of the stairs suddenly said, “I’ve called the police.”

  “Why the police?”

&n
bsp; But she turned away and said “hello hello” into her mobile, and I thought that she was old, and the communication caused her difficulty. Then I pictured what had taken place before. Had the young girl run around on the road screaming, created chaos with her youth and despair and her big hair, and now she would be sent back to where she came from, in the hands of those who have destroyed everything for her and would continue to do so.’

  ‘Imagine, you almost sound caring, Kristian, fill your flat with trafficked women, now you have a mission in Denmark and don’t need/Spring in Arabia.’

  ‘Thanks, I prefer Nescafé,’ Charles says and holds out his mug, ‘it’s not literature, but a con.’

  ‘The difference between delivering material from your mind directly from the sentences (like shooting from the hip) and to use scenes chapters narrator characters to slowly meticulously explain your content. Crudely put,’ Alma says.

  ‘Today I longed to rock you in my arms,’ Camilla says to Charles, ‘he seemed small as a doll’s house doll,’ (she says to the others,) ‘my doll’s house dolls had elastic-bandage/plaster bodies that could be bent and folded, everything Charles cannot; just stroking him or holding his knee, and it hurts even more.’

  ‘At first I read to be like you. Then I wrote to do what you did, and become your author. Then all that was liberated from me,’ Alma says.

  ‘I would really like to have had a whole heap of children,’ Camilla’s mum says, rocking her red sandals, ‘now I have to get on my feet, whoo-whoo-whoo, give me a hand, would you.’

  FROM THE HORSE’S MOUTH

  [Camilla]

  Married life with Charles is linked to the Osama bin Laden era, we were so in love in September 2001 that it was not until late morning on the twelfth that we realized what had happened on the eleventh, and the dissolution of our relationship took place in the days around bin Laden’s death. Two images frame it:

  1. Bodies in free fall

  2. A face shot to pieces

  The end of him. And us. The timely coincidence is the only thing they have in common, obviously. But I can air some slightly more symbolic material. The mark from the wedding ring will not disappear. (The old hide, the far-too-tight ring.) I wish that my thoughts were more organic today, that one grew out of the other, but it’s not like that. The idea of the break has a fragmented character, like the sorrow comes in ripples, and the relief too. I am a beach all these feelings crash against.

  I look at the fronts of the houses (for For Sale signs) and try to imagine a new existence. I would prefer not to live in one of these massive, red, continuous blocks that surrounds Classens Have, which Charles and I used to call the Apple Orchard, because the ground was covered with bitter wild apples throughout the autumn, Edward’s dog never gets bored of you throwing them so it can race after them or catch them in its mouth. Charles shoved the apples away with one of his walking sticks (for Nordic walking). Dogs are strictly forbidden in the garden. It is a park designated for dogaphobes, a man in a boiler suit explains to me one day, again again I am looking after Edward’s dog, so that he and Alma can get away for a short break. Alma is completely wrapped up in Edward. She no longer has any time for me, self-pity is unbecoming, up with everything, get back up on the horse, if only one had one, and it was in that moment the thought about the horse was implanted in me.

  ‘I train dogaphobes,’ the man says, and I wonder what the boiler suit contributes to, in the training, ‘they know that they can come here without being afraid.’

  I promise never to return, with the dog.

  I get a sense of not being able to breathe, that’s how heavy the red buildings that frame the park are, like a four-sided courtyard. My sleepless brain does not recollect the colour of the house I now live in, which I am going to move out of. Charles moved out long ago. The flat is up for sale. I was visited by three estate agents before I decided, the one suitor worse than the other. The worst one wore tight clothing, like a sailor, or a pimp. His eyes glistened, and his golden curls and wide rings also glistened. He suggested that I pack all my books up in boxes and drag them down to the basement and take down the bookcases because they block far too much light, and the space would seem larger without them. The idea made me cry with exhaustion.

  The second was too fat, and he had holes in his socks I noticed, when he politely took off his shoes in the entrance. And I happened to think about one of my colleagues the other day, at a meeting at the institute, who had pulled his feet halfway out of his shoes, and sat rocking his feet, the heels worn on the socks, and for the sake of nature, for environmental reasons, he wouldn’t replace them, but walked his socks off, to the last thread, and combined with early greying and an unkempt beard this made him look a little like a gnome, I thought about his presentation of himself, in one piece of work after the other, like a giant Cupid, a hard fucker, to put it bluntly, and I thought that he ought to be careful that this elfish nature did not damage his self-presentation, because now I pictured him, fucking with his heels poking out of his socks.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m a little nervous.’

  ‘Is that the effect I have on you?’ the estate agent asked.

  ‘No, it’s my entire situation,’ I replied.

  And he nodded, disappointed maybe. The sight of my bulging bookcases made him, not unexpectedly, start telling me that he was writing a book.

  ‘You too,’ I said because soon there will be more authors than readers in the world. He talked warmly and at length about his book that involved a good deal of research and dealt with a military unit under the command of NATO, infused with a dose of fiction. Finally I said: ‘If you can get me one of those cheap co-op flats over there (I pointed out the window), I will get you a meeting with a publisher. Then you can talk about your book and not risk simply having your manuscripts returned unread with a standard refusal attached.’ (I thought that Alma could easily act as the publisher, that is if she had the time.) He went quiet, and I thought that he probably had not got as far with the book as he was trying to imply. The atmosphere became tense.

  The fact that I chose number three was not due to the low price, but because he reminds me of a boy I know and care for, he still (at the age of fifteen) cuts pictures of bridal dresses out of catalogues. He was gentle and girlish. And rather attractive, with icy-blue eyes. Unfortunately my lawyer (because suddenly I have an estate agent lawyer financial advisor and accountant, all I need is someone to help me sleep, a sleep coach who comes every night around bedtime and sits down with me and tells me how heavy my body is, how empty my head is), thinks that I should not have chosen a discount agent, but I have done it now – because of a gentle nature. When he was leaving, and our eyes met, in my mind I bent him over his sales listings and his suppressed homosexuality (if suppressions still exist, in our wide-open age) and placed myself opposite him bent over a book and had us look up and carefully smile at each other one late evening in our life together in this flat which I will after all not need to sell.

  No. Because the mere thought of again having to live right up close to another’s mood makes me want to run far away. The worse the mood I am subjected to, the more I flutter around the person, it is my moth side, I cannot stay away from the flame. When Charles locked down, or – when he bolted up the door to his soul, I threw myself towards it, open sesame, but not the slightest crack.

  The might of his depression. A black black cloud hung over the bed where he lay. Towards evening it became unbearable. It was a prison. Now I’ve escaped.

  I am back from my walk. My house turns out to be red. But at least there are yellow bricks mixed in with the red to create patterns, and the neighbouring houses have different colours. My house is narrow and interspersed with yellow. I do not feel like moving from it. But I can’t afford to keep living alone. It feels as if a ditch has been dug from the top of my head down to my belly button, and running through it is undiluted pain. I have said goodbye to Charles. A month ago he told me that he would be ill without me. Tha
t he would not ask me for anything else. That I should move on with my life. That the air had gone out of our relationship – and how was the air going to do any different, I have sat on a chair by his bed for three years. That the happiness and desire have disappeared. We have not been able to talk about anything other than illness for a long time; when we tried, it felt unnatural. So here I am, alone. When he gave me the message, my arms became like appendages, and at the end hung my hands like empty shovels. I am no longer going to carry anything. I have it straight from the horse’s mouth. Charles will carry himself. Only himself, not my grief at him being ill (over the years my tears have become a deluge), my difficulty in sitting still for very long at a time, my inability to put up with him often not answering me – because it is too far to the words inside his heavy mind. The terrible way he is held prisoner by unhappiness. His own prisoner in a fortress, which he cannot be called out of. Stiffness and silence, not a face, but a mask (of a face). I truly began to fear this becoming stone.

  I don’t want to lie to myself. I had long thought the same thing during my walks in the parks where I walked and soaked up all the colours. While Charles just lay and lay. The future felt like a tied-up bag. Now it is open… without Charles I feel at times that I am in free fall – through time.

  I have probably said earlier that I have devoted more than enough time to death – to last a lifetime – but still I can’t stop seeing the origin of the break-up with Charles and I as – no, view the following as a picture of the distance that had come between us… We realized that we wanted (one day) to each be buried in own end of the country and not, as I had imagined, side by side, that is the smooth back of one urn against the stomach of the other, for example at Holmens Kirkegård which is so endlessly French, with a long avenue dividing it into two, and oh the waves of anemones and crocuses across the graves in the spring, and outside the churchyard is the city, teeming. The churchyard that is framed by the capital, surrounded by houses with balconies that people come out on, people who send gazes down towards the graves; but Charles had decided on the district where he came from, at the other end of the country. I thought I dared not be buried in such an empty place, so deserted, so windswept, colder in the winter than any other place, in this final bed.