Companions

by Christina Hesselholdt

  ‘The last time my mum was here, she looked around the garden before we left and said: “I don’t think I’ll be coming back.”’

  ‘You’ll never know whether she slammed the door behind her (her own expression) – or if the door was shut on her.’

  ‘This cod is delicious.’

  ‘Yes, it’s difficult being human, Camilla, for me too,’ Kristian says.

  QUEEN OF THE JAMS WITH THE STICKY LEGS

  [Alma]

  Write like I’m stretching (I want to), or like when the dog stretches, when it makes itself long and swims or crawls across the lawn, one long free movement, (the skin wrinkles sensually near the base of the tail) such a delight, then it rolls onto its back, then it continues swimming, the long white dog on the large lawn. Edward has given it to Camilla, I was so tired of it wanting to crawl into our bed. Camilla sleeps alone for the most part.

  It stings, what Alwilda told Edward when she left him. He told me about it. She expressed it so hideously: that he was not much fun.

  Alwilda has no sense of boundaries, we all know that. There was even a time when she flirted with Charles, with large flower arrangements and jams (she makes jam to calm her nerves, keep the anxiety in check, preserve, preserve, all year long, she has a freezer full of berries), she sat on the edge of his bed (low-cut top, her breasts right under his big nose), ‘I love you,’ she wrote to him, why didn’t Camilla send her packing?

  ‘Alwilda is like an insect that gets carried around by the wind,’ she simply said, ‘she’ll be off somewhere else soon.’

  ‘She wants to see how much power she has,’ I answered, ‘the queen is bored.’ (Queen of the Jams with the Sticky Legs.)

  (I don’t know why I picture her making jam with her entire body, her feet down in the preserving jar stomping up and down like with grapes.)

  Camilla has always been slow on the uptake, ‘sometimes I wonder which world you actually exist in,’ Charles once said to her, ‘the same one as you – as all of you,’ she said to us, wounded and on guard. But I think that business with Alwilda destroyed Camilla’s love for Charles. She stopped wanting to be with him, to be by his bedside. She hid in her office behind the kitchen. She hid behind busyness and obligations. Behind her tears and angry roars.

  Alwilda dragged Edward along to places where people copulate in public while watching porn; clubs. And he did not care for it. Room after room, left in darkness, only these glaring colours and sounds from the screens on the walls. He told me about the time he was in one of those rooms, banging away on top of Alwilda. Then a young man came in and sat down in an armchair next to them and started to wank while watching them.

  ‘The idea of having to get up and put my trousers on while he was looking at me,’ Edward said, ‘was unbearable. I stopped moving. “Are you dead?” Alwilda said and wriggled out from under me and got up and smiled at the man on the chair, who incidentally looked practically in awe of his erection which he grasped with both hands. He looked like someone holding a divine statue. Fortunately he was not looking at me.”’

  I prefer what I call primal sex (primal as in screams, not numbers), and apparently Edward does too, with only the darkness and the humming of flesh; like a swing where you are flung back and forth between the other person and yourself, and you never want it to end.

  THE LIST OF ITEMS AND MATTERS ALREADY WRITTEN

  [Edward]

  Camilla is now where I once was: at the mercy of mourning. Mourning (mine) is now something that occasionally rears its head, and which I can shove aside if I don’t have the strength or time to handle it. I am happy that I wrote Mourning Diary (even though I felt like some kind of accountant while doing so), so I can go back and see what it was like, what and how I thought and felt.

  Alma writes everything down. I am being recorded. Camilla’s mum once said that when she was young and wrote poems, she got a sense that she only looked at things in order to be able to write about them; and she did not like that. She was not at it for very long anyway, writing, probably only a few years. Alma mentions, if I can express it a little rigidly, being in the world and her transforming the world and existence into writing have long gone hand in hand. It is equivalent to reading, she says, experiencing and interpreting simultaneously. To exist and to write absolutely belong together, they can no longer be understood separately, she says. All of that I understand very well. I have never believed that analyzing destroys anything. On the contrary. But I felt offended when one day I pointed something out to her at the sea, and she replied that after she had written about the sea, she had stopped looking at it. As though it was emptied once and for all. I almost felt offended on behalf of the sea. It had been crossed off the list of items and matters already written.

  ‘I wonder if I’ll end up there one day?’ I asked cautiously, and I pictured her sitting in a wasteland, an emptied world, holding a thick book (with a pencil stub fastened to the book with twine, just like my granddad’s ledger.)

  Then she got angry and replied that she wanted her literature in peace. And I replied that I wanted to be able to say something without later having to see it in print.

  It developed into an argument, our first. And now I have an irrepressible urge to flip through her notebook to see what she has written about me. But I keep away from the rows of cutting alphabet marching; enclosing annihilating not-summoning; Alma, you ought to be ashamed.

  EEYORE WITH A STICK OF DYNAMITE IN HIS MOUTH

  [Kristian]

  The others (my so-called friends, the pack of comfort companions, where, if we are talking about Pooh and company, Alwilda is Tigger, I’m Eeyore, with a stick of dynamite in my mouth, argh, the rest of them I can’t place, oh yes, the always-kind Edward must be Pooh, but still no little Roo in our midst) don’t know, and they are not going to know either, no, of course they are not – I have accepted the consequence of wanting to make a difference in our raving world, but am rooted to the spot, more about that later maybe. It would take a very loud bang before the others (airy-fairies arseholes sods maggots) would so much as raise an eyebrow, let alone raise their head above their teacups, has it always been like that, that they were completely indifferent to the world that surrounds us, apart from Alwilda of course, but the closest thing to compare her to is a blind force, she plunges headfirst into anything, for her it is simply a matter of using her many strengths, her restless energy.

  Once upon a time we planned a series of meetings to talk about what was happening to our society, and what we could do, it was back in 2001 2002 2003 when we had Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the Danish People’s Party and the war in Iraq, as big a shock as bin Laden, almost, and much of what we had assumed was solid began to collapse; Alma tried writing essays, about Danishness for example, something that was discussed to the point of vomiting, but thinking has never been one of her strengths (what actually is? And she could also have taken better care of her bikini line), it became a kind of third-rate column; we ended up sitting around talking about Iraq and genetically modified crops and Afghanistan and milk-no-milk and opium fields and the corruption of the financial markets, all kinds of crap was swept onto the same dustpan – or the other way round, like the other day in Camilla’s stable, the shovel under a pile of horse apples, a cluster of shit that divides into countless turds upon contact, and what I was thinking is that I would blow myself up, not to compare it with anything other than a giant fart, hello I would like to direct your attention to the fact that we have a problem, several problems; a lot of people blowing stuff up, let off without providing a reason, the surroundings are forced to conjecture, that is how I leave it (to others to find the reason, for example to the soft toys).

  But before that I ought to have hung up a sign in the gateway, for my neighbours, a proclamation, about sorting their rubbish better: I hope you burn in hell if you keep putting things in the wrong place!

  Now we have containers for hard plastic and metal and one more I can’t remember at this raging moment, as well
as the classics, paper and cardboard and glass respectively, but what does that matter if someone is not sorting properly. I understood it as such, that if just one object ends up in the wrong container, the entire contents of the container are burnt as normal rubbish. It is insanely frustrating, when I take the time to sort mine properly, that someone goes and ruins everything. The idiocy the indifference knows no bounds: some people even throw normal rubbish bags in with the hard plastic. Maybe I should set my banger off in a container, in the courtyard, then it would not be difficult to find the cause, no guesswork necessary. On the other hand it would scatter the entire mess. Everything that had been laboriously collected & sorted. But wasn’t that the very point? Yes, it was, just hop up in the cardboard and light the fuse, teeth-gritting hand-wringing. First I get undressed, so I can meet the jury of houris in puris, they might as well see what they are getting straight away. (I see myself climbing out of the cardboard like a wet dog if it is a dud.)

  ONCE THEY START TO LOOK

  [Camilla]

  Yesterday I went to the hospital with a bite that had got infected on my back. I went to my own doctor first, and he sent me to be admitted, he thought we were dealing with a boil. (He took a photo with his mobile, so I could see it, after promising to delete it afterwards. And it looked rather ugly, with a number of small festering growths. I have no idea who would have enjoyed looking at it if he had not deleted it, but sent it out into the world.) It was appallingly busy, and I waited for ten hours, in a bed behind a curtain, first to have blood tests taken and then to meet a doctor, behind another curtain in the room there was a very old person with pneumonia who simply wanted to die. When the doctor finally arrived, she stood by the end of my bed and said: ‘You might think it strange of me to ask, but when was the last time you had your period?’ When I did not reply, she continued: ‘Is it possible that you’re pregnant?’, she straightened up and said that the elevated levels of hCG hormones in the blood were an indication that I was.

  ‘Once they start to look,’ Alma later said, ‘they always find something.’ (Later still she told me that when I told her the news, she had heard a loud bang in her ears, like the sound of a drawer being slammed shut. ‘Something has come to an end,’ she said dramatically, ‘Camilla, it’s going to be a long time before we go travelling again, just the two of us.’ And then she launched into an almost shameless wallowing in the highlights of our various journeys.

  ‘Do you remember the time in Venice you slapped me because you were starving, and I couldn’t decide on a restaurant? Do you remember the time on Kos you couldn’t find our guest house and were gone an entire night, and I was frightened to death? Do you remember dragging your typewriter around all those years and not typing a single word? And what it was like taking the hundred-metre-long escalator down to the underground in St Petersburg, racing along, with the lights flashing by? And when the pack of wild dogs approached us early one morning in Belgrade, and you chased them off with your umbrella?’

  Then she burst into tears, and I said: ‘Alma, Alma, only yesterday you told me that you love the ordinary; the everyday. You had just passed Søerne around lunchtime and were enjoying watching people on the benches unpacking all manner of fast food. And I prefer to be at home, you know how miserable I get when I travel; floating about; without any fixed point whatsoever; something the wind simply takes hold of. But when I see Paris on TV, nonetheless I get a little wistful and feel life passing me by, as if it is there right there on the Left Bank that life is being lived.’

  ‘Besides, you’ve got Edward. And I have decided,’ I said, contrary to my intentions, but in order to get some peace, ‘to let you have a look at Document Black before I throw it out.’

  Then at long last she sniffled a little congratulations.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘we can go to New York together if the father is American.’)

  And they certainly did (find something), the issue with my back was very minor, the doctor drained what turned out to be a blister filled with fluid, while I lay on my stomach on a gynaecology bed, the only free bed at the overcrowded institution, considering the advantages and disadvantages of the two possible fathers, the one overseas, Mr Camel (with the unexpectedly harsh kicks), married and absent, and the veterinarian’s brother who along with his sister would probably enforce harsh discipline, raise the child like they would raise a dog or a horse. Maybe they, that is he, whichever one it was, did not need to know. And suddenly I saw us in the distant future, the child and me, sitting across from each other at a table, the child demanding an answer from me. Then I saw the two of us walking, along the fjord with all the glittering water, and I shifted in the uncomfortable bed and looked at the doctor who stood holding a cotton swab, bent over me, and asked when it might be due. Because it was. Then we started to calculate, and it was very reassuring (only for a moment) to sink down into the world of numbers.

  MY TWO MAIN CHARACTERS

  [Alwilda]

  These are the two traits (I am/about me/mine) that I know best:

  1. Spitting out plum stones is something one ordinarily connects with a certain cheerfulness, and I am doing that, my pockets are full of mirabelles. I have just pulled the branch down in order to get hold of the best the ripest the reddest. But I am not the least bit cheerful, despite all the spitting, the flying stones.

  Who knows whether anyone thinks it is natural to live, to feel like a fish in water, here in life.

  I who love the city yesterday sat in Christianshavns Torv and felt completely isolated from all the walking cycling driving laughing coughing hawking old young those with dogs or children and those without. Alone. Isolated. I have always had to haul others in after labouring to catch them in my net. Nobody ever hauls me in. That is the price of suffering from an abundance of energy, all initiative is left to me. So it was a matter of getting into my car and driving out to the country, where people are few and far between. She had just returned from the stables, and dusted, booted and spurred, she told me that she is pregnant.

  ‘… and she appeared for a second like some insolent and powerful captain, returning booted and spurred from a field of triumph, the dust of battle yet upon him, confronting the sovereign powers whom he was now ready if need be to bend to his will.’

  — Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

  But I did not try to talk her into having an abortion, even though she is getting on in years and does not know who the father is. I just thought I should have been the one expecting.

  2. I have met a frail woman, a touching individual with a few ailments. I am so on top of the world that I can’t keep still. She is a colleague, a new employee. When we walk down the corridor together, to the staff room, during lunch break – I could pick her up, high in the air, and run off shouting. Then I picture myself as a rapist with a porcelain figurine. She has small, delicate hands and is disproportionately aged in relation to her years, wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, furrowed cheeks, an old neck. She is from Russia and her name is Swaka. And so delightful. And she has a sense of humour and has nothing against it all being over one day. For that reason she merrily grows older and older. In a mood like that I feel like giving women I pass a smack on the bottom. Men cannot deal with me – that’s why I have no boyfriend. This mood, this me… yesterday I saw a red evening bag in a shop that sold nothing but black items, and I thought: That’s how it feels when this mood comes over me, like a crimson flash of lightning in my brain, bang then I am nothing but energy bang spanking new, every kind of reservation swept aside, I shine and sparkle, I charge ahead on a backdrop of black.

  In A Severed Head (which Camilla lent me) the characters live with their front doors unlocked, or they all have keys to one another’s houses, and for that reason they constantly run in and out of one another’s houses, and they run into one another, in one another’s houses. And this wide-openness shapes the very atmosphere in the novel. Then one of them has settled in, drunk and despondent, in the basement, and the sister of th
e owner of the house (who looks like a cliché of a lesbian from the beginning of the twentieth century, close-cropped hair wearing thick-soled walking shoes and a tailor-made suit in heavy tweed, imagine Gertrude Stein) accidentally bumps into him down there. The novel is cut like the episodes of Sherlock Holmes I love watching on TV (gas lamps, carriages, opium, falls from great heights, London in fog and rain, not to mention the capes), one person says something crucial about another and then cut: we find ourselves in a scene with him, where all of his dirty work is plain to see.

  The characters are well-off and either they do not work or work very little, and therefore they have time to ensure love is the most important thing in their lives. The actual drama. They have affairs with one another, left, right, and centre, they run in and out of one another’s hearts. (For that reason it is also very difficult for the novel to end – because who is going to finally and conclusively remain in whose heart?) When the characters are not loving or (briefly) mourning for their lost love, they are talking about love. A conversation might sound like this:

  ‘– What anyway does a love do which has no course?

  – It is changed into something else. Something heavy or sharp, that you carry within and bind around with your substance until it ceases to hurt. But that is your affair.’

  — Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

  I come to think about it, because I have stood on the sidelines and observed how Camilla has recovered from her darling over the ocean, oh, this small addition: ‘But that is your affair.’