Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  My cousin suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth and said: ‘No, I’m sorry. I thought you knew,’ and they both tried to protect me because I was the youngest, their little cousin, they called me.

  From that moment everything had to be approached differently than before: when someone I loved so much, my grandma, had tried to kill her own child. But how differently: with greater suspicion? With a new weight? With a constant feeling of a catastrophe lurking right around the corner? I don’t know.

  Here sat my cousins, their mum had survived and became a mum herself, and my grandma still walked around baking her flat cakes. Their mum could remember how someone had pressed firmly around her wrist in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

  My dad was in the living room where it happened, but he was quite small, he has no recollection of it.

  ‘But the atmosphere in the living room that evening may have taken hold of me,’ he once said and put his hand on his heart, or somewhere close to it, ‘the incident,’ he continued, ‘has not, by the way, been significant for my life, but it rests within me, encapsulated.’ (Then I thought about a bullet from a firearm, that cannot be surgically removed, but which the body over time encapsulates.)

  To this story belongs a previous story, or several, which can serve as an explanation, as an interpretation – childhood: my grandma’s mum died when she was relatively young, her dad remarried.

  My mum: ‘And what do you think the stepmother named her own daughter?’

  I did not know, but the hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up, because of my mum’s voice, her expression

  My mum: ‘Meta.’

  My grandma was called Meta.

  My mum: ‘As though the first Meta did not exist.’

  Or else she said: ‘So the first Meta no longer existed.’

  Or: ‘Then the first Meta ceased to exist.’

  Marriage as an explanation: My paternal grandmother’s husband got drunk on pay day, and when he came home drunk, he wanted to sleep with her. My aunt remembers how her mum held her up in front of her like a shield – against the man.

  When I heard that, I realised that my grandmother could not leave her daughter with him, but had to take her with her into death.

  Schizophrenia as an explanation: My paternal grandmother’s head was full of voices. The loneliness. Alone, with the voices; she alone heard them. But I could hear when she answered them, so I (as a child) made her aware that she was talking to herself, and it made her self-conscious, but also present again, and loving, so that her mouth formed into a shy small loveable smile. She was very loveable. (Just like my granddad she was very fond of blue, intense blue, all her clothes were blue, dear blue ancestors.)

  I have begun to sit out in the garden early, with my coffee, while everything is still damp with dew. Then I sit and watch the garden wake up. I place cushions on the garden furniture, and the dog lays down next to me. At the top of a tree near me there is a pair of doves sitting and tenderly polishing each other’s feathers, or they bicker and coo, they can keep at it for hours. Then I pull out Document Black again, even though the morning is almost too beautiful for the monster, I have started to think that I never want to leave this place.

  My granddad has come to a halt on the tiled path in front of the kitchen door of his house, it is December, he has been standing there for so long that his hands have turned a whitish-blue. He broods over all the installations that can break, the oil burner the cesspool the oven the water heater. When we, that is my mum and I, realize that he is standing out in the cold, my mum grabs his hands and helps him inside. Christmas Eve, he won’t allow Christmas dinner to be made, because the oven could break, and he could end up going broke from electricity consumption. We have proposed eating cold food like every other night so as not to worry him, it is his house, he is the one who is depressed, we approach it like scouts, no Christmas Eve this year is fine. When the neighbour’s house begins to smell of Christmas food, nevertheless it becomes difficult to accept. We decide to defy him and at least make rice pudding, it would be nice to have something hot, the house is cold so as not to challenge the oil burner to give out. Meanwhile he moves around us complaining, raising and lowering his hands and telling us that we have completely lost it. I don’t know if it’s right, that he practically attempts to tear the wooden spoon from my mum while she stirs. My mum has looked after him for a couple of months, he really does not want to be admitted, and is getting tired. I am the only one in the family who is never ill. My mum constantly feared that I would get ill, but I never did. Around me they fall like dominoes, soon my granddad will knock over my mum, when my grandma was alive, she was the one who got knocked over, and the other way around. They constantly found themselves on a see-saw, when one rose, the other sunk. My granddad does not want any of the pudding, he waves the plate away with his heavy hands, we eat it in darkness so as not to bother him further, because of the danger of fire there can be no talk of candles. I have come to celebrate Christmas with them and in order to push for my granddad to be admitted before he topples my mum. The following takes place in the living room, by the door to the corridor, where the stairs to the attic are, my mum and I are sleeping in the attic, maybe he discovered that we have filled a couple of hot water bottles, he accuses my mum of something or other, I can see how fragile she is, that it is only a matter of days or maybe weeks before she topples, and so I say to him: ‘You old fool,’ everything comes to a stop, I have admired and loved him my entire life, there was never a bad word between us before, and I regretted it on the spot and said that I didn’t mean it, but he took it (fool) personally and sat down. And I could see how he sat with the word, and that I would never be able to get it back from him.

  But he gave it back himself. Later, when he had been admitted, and I visited him – at a medical ward, because there were physical difficulties too, the depression now gone, and he sat in a white bathrobe reduced to at least half his former size – he said that he knew I had not meant it, and we ended up somewhere in the vicinity of where we had always been, before the arguing by the stairs to the attic – not the same place, because he had become so small and was soon going to die.

  It was not always like a see-saw, sometimes all three of them, my mum my grandma my granddad, were ill at the same time, so one lay in the bedroom the other on the sofa the third in the attic (and one time I even prepared a document, probably inspired by all the old documents uncovered by The Famous Five, with grandma’s name written in full, ‘I XXXX promise never again to go to bed during the day,’ which she signed, but no sooner had she put her signature on the document than she had gone back to bed), I sat in the living room, the entire time there was the sound of the clock on the sideboard that I hated, the sound of summer or winter ticking away, no the season didn’t matter, it was always afternoon in the room, stale afternoon, hence my dislike for afternoons, as soon as afternoon arrives, nothing can turn out differently that day – ‘but it does not have to be a crutch,’ I can hear Kristian saying.

  It seems to me very wrong to deal with only a single aspect of a person, like here the ill, the ill was the exception, the Christmas Eve definitely an exceptional situation (preceded by twenty-nine perfectly normal ones in my memory blurring, because they are probably indistinguishable Christmas Eves.) There has to be something else. There is an infinite row of bright days, it’s just a matter of digging in.

  An excursion, by boat, a summer’s day, to Tærø and Lilleø, which is really only a patch of sand, and which you can almost reach in one long jump from Tærø. Now there are horses on Tærø, there is an airfield, and you have to ask the owner for permission to come ashore. It wasn’t like that back then, you could just show up, and I certainly don’t think there were horses, only cows, suddenly I remember how careful you had to be so as not to accidentally step in one of the large greenish-black cowpats with flies suspended above.

  When we had eaten lunch, my granddad placed his cap over his eyes (and a pillow
he had brought with him under his head) and lay down to nap, while I inhabited Tærø alone and walked across the island and looked down a high slope at the beach below, which was full of rocks and lay in shade, and where it was windy, and the waves pounded the coast with a hard sound, until I suddenly had enough of the way the wind tore at the trees, and hurried back to the sunny beach where my granddad in the meanwhile might have woken and started to fill the sacks we had brought with us with sand.

  One time I had stayed on the other side of the island so long, maybe daydreaming, leaning against a tree, that my granddad had long since managed to gather the sand he wanted, and already sat in the dinghy ready to sail.

  ‘There you are, I was just about to weigh anchor,’ he said and even though I knew he would never have left me on the island, I still felt the isolation of the place inside me and hurried to hike up my trousers and wade out to him.

  To set off had demanded, it always did, a certain amount of preparation, with things that had to be transported down to the harbour, stacked up in the clog hall, in the courtyard, maybe all the way out to the lawn, where sails, rather patched, for example a faded green sail with brown patches, were unfolded in order to be inspected. The food was packed in a bike basket, big sandwiches, a thermos, light beer lemon water raspberry fizz green soda, salt pepper sugar, packs of home-baked pastries, mug, cream in a fizzy drink bottle with a cheerful cork made of kitchen roll. And there was also a dog back then, there were always dogs and cats, one replaced the previous. Then we packed (I am tired of first person singular, like a top that is too tight, and of first person plural) the load, my grandma always kind when she sent us off (because imagine if we never returned, but that wasn’t nicely put, she probably was truly happy on our behalf) with the goodies in the basket, as long as we promised to come home on time, so she would not worry and go out on the hill with binoculars to look out across the sea, to see whether a white dinghy with a blue railing did not sail into her line of sight soon and behind it a small orange dot: the Optimist I was given when I turned twelve, I wonder what she might get up to while we were gone, maybe late in the afternoon she would sit down with the paper, already back then (when?) I experienced it as if she took on a role, that of the newspaper reader, when she leaned forward for the paper on the coffee table and unfolded it, and holding it at a proper distance, she began to read, with her head tilted a little. She always wore lipstick when she read, as if she were a guest at someone’s house. The rest of the family read all the time, and she was outside, because she did not read books, because they did not convey anything to her, because she was unable to form connections, grasp the storyline and the characters. ‘So who is that?’ she might ask an hour into a film at the sight of the main character. I think of her when I watch a ball game where I don’t know the rules; how the match dissolves into moments without connection.

  What was her proper element? The embroidery? Because she thought it was better to create beautiful things than to read. The kitchen? No, but acting as the hostess: when the food was ready and was on the table, and she said, bon appétit, smiling and powdered, her hair in place beneath the pearl-studded hair net, Blue Grass on the wrist and behind the ears, everything homemade and wonderful, and she was met with praise; then she beamed, then she flourished – until her husband began to act like an ill-bred child and show a lack of table manners, perhaps to seize the attention of the guests, perhaps to make cracks in her happiness, as revenge for something that happened earlier that day or earlier that year.

  My granddad was always happy when he was heading off, and for me, that was what the holiday was all about, these excursions. For my granddad it meant freedom and then to gather sand for cement (for concreting tiles?), so we placed as many pails as possible on the bikes, and also sacks, he balanced a mast and maybe a freshly painted boat hook, resting on the seat and handlebars, we had to walk the bikes, the load was so heavy, and hold them back down the hill to the harbour.

  Sometimes I was seized by panic at the thought of someone coming out of the sea and grabbing hold of the Optimist (I was so close to the water, it was like sitting in a walnut shell), or else it was just because the water was so deep and black, in any case I began to yell practically scream for my granddad who was hard of hearing and could hear nothing, but just waved cheerfully at me from his jolly boat, in his proper element: with his arm on the tiller, a cheroot (Grøn Havana) in his mouth. But when it came time to sail through the passage in the dam, I joined him in the jolly boat. If I could not get right up close to him on my own, because I never became a very good sailor, never entirely familiar with the direction of the wind (once I had to get out of the Optimist and pull it, shamefaced, wading through the low water, home to the harbour, like Gulliver pulling the Lilliputians’ navy behind him), he would pull me over with the boat hook, then the two dinghies would grate and crunch against each other. We had to lower the masts. We had to row through the passage, with the Optimist in tow. The walls (of the passage) were made of raw cement, and you could see how strong the current was from the ripples along the walls. There was an echo. You felt locked in, it was a relief to get out into the light again. And there lay the islands – waiting.

  Today Alwilda came for lunch, the sun and the wine made us drowsy; Alwilda placed the pillows from the garden furniture on the grass, and we lay down next to each other and fell asleep. It felt both reassuring and a little too intimate to lie there side by side under the whispering trees. I don’t think we had done that since we were children.

  She is a liberating element in our concerned part of the world that shakes with fear of death and tries to stretch out life like a rubber band by safeguarding the personal safety and health. She drinks too much wine and smokes too many cigarettes. (My dad refers to her as the wild lady.) She does not use sun screen, but flips and turns under the burning sun twelve hours in a row to get dark-brown for her lover, and she drives fast in her car, she circumvents the chicanes by steering straight ahead, so that she does not have to slow down. She is master of the moment. Alwilda, you are an ode to freedom, occasionally a little impatient.

  Much of the time I do nothing. I sit looking at all the things that ought to be sorted, the garden, the house. ‘I did not take into account that the trees would grow,’ my mum once said. Nor did I. There is the ladder, there is the saw, or if nothing else: There is the note with the telephone number for my gardeners. There is nobody to prompt me to make an effort, nobody I can nominate to be my superego. The neighbour used to take on that role, automatically. But she has become conspicuously mild – towards me. There is often a bunch of marigolds or a couple of cucumbers lying on my garden table from her. On the other hand, she fights with her boyfriend out in the open so the garden shakes, I don’t know why I think it is worse to hear a seventy-year-old woman like my neighbour shout ‘fuck it (the birthday)’ than when a younger person does it. I go down to the fjord and walk and look up at the wild slopes and at the many nuances of green, the dark green treetops, the light green tall wild grass, and another green and an almost blue: marram grass. My house is a house of cards, so let it come crashing down. Well, I simply blot out the gardener’s gaze the builder’s gaze the housewife’s gaze and observe the hollyhocks’ silky grace, swaying in many colours, on the terrace. The next moment I think: not a chance, I will appropriate every single centimetre of this house and this garden, I will make it into my everything. And I get up and tear off the lid of the tin of wood treatment. (I also like staring at my laundry while it dries in the wind, it can almost make me fall into a trance, I wonder if it is a kind of fetishism, self-fetishism, before I know it I’ll be stealing from my own drying line – some might claim that I have already done that, intellectually speaking, with Document Black. Ack, women and their washing – Alwilda told me that when she was on a trip with Edward, she felt connection love a strong affiliation to her knickers and tights when they hung flapping in the wind, far out in the nothingness of Mozambique. Representation of Home, I assume, i
n all the foreign. I have been allowed to use the washing machine at the camping site just around the corner. The person who runs it is also bad-tempered, one of the campers has encircled their tent with potted plants, and when I arrive with my laundry in tow, I hear him shout to her that if she does not have them removed, he will personally kick them away, and afterwards he would give her a proper kick in the arse. I could wash one of the horse’s heavy hairy filthy horse cloths in his machine, that would keep him busy for a while, picking out the bristly horse hair. This is not the most peaceful place on the earth. A podgy man walks around hoovering up twigs and leaves from the area around his camper, how many other machines does he have inside the camper? And how much does he look forward to every time he can turn one of them on?)