by Ida Jessen
“Thyregod in a minute,” he said a couple of hours later. “Just down the hill here. On a clear day you can see it all, the church, the dairy, the mill. You’ll be looking forward to getting yourself installed, I shouldn’t wonder.”
I asked him where he lived, and he said: “On the farm we passed a kilometer back.”
I liked that. The fact that he had not pointed it out as we went by. There would have been plenty of time at the pace we were going. I understood he was not the sort who wished to impose himself.
It was dusk by the time we reached the school where I was to live and work.
* * *
I have begun to pack, rather meticulously. At the grocery the other day, I asked Rosenstand if I might take any packing cases he no longer needs, and this morning he came by with eleven large ones and four smaller ones, with the promise of more to come. By way of thanks, I plied him with mid-morning coffee, which he sucked through a sugar lump. “But where are you intending to move?” he asked. I told him I was unsure as yet, but that everything had to be packed regardless, and he could hardly disagree. He suggested I give Vigand’s clothes to the Civic and Tradesmen’s Association. They would know who was most in need, he said. So now the larger part is packed. Only his shirts still remain. I imagine that in a moment I shall tear them from their hangers and hurl them into the case with the rest of his clothes, so that I may understand once and for all that his smell is no longer for me. That it has gone with him. Vigand would applaud it, if he could.
* * *
—
My thoughts at present are on what it means to have a home. There must be a roof over one’s head, shelter and warmth, but these are of course not the only requirements. Terkelline Andersen refused to vacate her decrepit, broken-down house when the parish council wished to install her somewhere else, and declared that she wanted to die in her own home. And her son lives there still, though in his case perhaps feelings are the least of it. At any rate, I have heard it said that he would be quite as happy in a foxhole. How anyone would know is beyond me — certainly he will not have said a word himself. He is not the communicative kind. He was here yesterday as well, just after the grocer Rosenstand left, selling rubber bands. There was still some coffee in the pot, and I asked him to come in and sat him down on the bench in the kitchen. His face is crimson red and troubled, and most of the time he sits staring at the floor, but suddenly, and this has always been his way, he will lift his gaze and his eyes will be piercing and firm. When I was young and new here, he frightened me many a time with that look. He was not in the habit of knocking and would walk straight in. He would leave his wooden shoes in the passage and I would not hear him until he was standing in the living room. He could come in the early mornings and after school at any time in the evening, and it was because of him that I began to lock my door. The folk were unaccustomed to it. In these parts they lock their houses only when going out, and even then they leave the key in the door so that visitors should not come in vain to the step. Once, I had fallen asleep with my arms over the table in the kitchen, and all of a sudden I felt a hand pass over my hair, gently and with great caution, and when I opened my eyes and looked up he was standing there with his ruddy cheeks and big red beard. They called him Petting-Jens in those days. On another occasion, I discovered an unplucked drake dangling from my door handle. It had been dead for some time and looked rather seedy to say the least. There was no shot in it, nor any sign of such, and I knew it could only be from him. Not that he wished to frighten me, but because he genuinely believed he could make an impression by wringing the neck of a duck, and that I would find it delicate and inviting. I took a spade from the outhouse and buried it in the yard immediately.
In the beginning I repressed my sense of unease, believing that I should present myself as hospitable and without prejudice. Occasionally, I would offer him coffee, if only for the chance to tell him that he ought to wash himself and get his hair cut, but he never took the slightest notice and it would feel awkward to have him sit there and stare at me, and moreover tongues began to wag, people said he had taken a fancy to the free-school mistress and had even been inside her chamber, which was true enough, but not the way they thought, and so I put an end to it. After that he shut himself away for years and has only recently ventured out again. We have never spoken properly. Yet he is capable of the oddest things. Today, he quoted from Terje Vigen:
There lived a remarkably grizzled man
on the uttermost, barren isle
he never harmed, in the wide world’s span,
a soul by deceit or by guile;
his eyes, though, sometimes would blaze and fret
most when a storm was nigh,
and then people sensed he was troubled yet
and then there were few that felt no threat
with Terje Vigen by.
Nevertheless, it was no comfortable sitting, and he mumbles as well and is therefore hard to understand. However, I gathered it was Ibsen and asked him how he knew it. He told me it was from reading. I bought ten rubber bands from him and hope that the Civic and Tradesmen’s Association will provide him with a good pair of trousers. I felt no compulsion to do so myself.
* * *
When that evening we turned up Nørregade we came again into the open land. “There it is, Frøken Høy,” said Peter Carlsen, pointing into the flurrying snow. He brought the horses to a standstill and helped me down. Lifted my bicycle from the back. I asked if I might offer him coffee, but he had to be getting home to tend to the livestock, and I happened to think of what a detour he had made in order to take me all the way to the town. He placed a key in my hand. “Peder Møllergaard sends his regards. He wanted to be here to bid you welcome, but he’ll be over tomorrow. Are you going to be all right?”
I stepped into a hallway and opened a door on the right which turned out to lead into the schoolroom. There was a lamp on the teacher’s desk, which I managed to light. I was so anxious to see what awaited me. The schoolroom with its desks and blackboard, the round, black tiled stove and the peat box. A tall, glass-fronted cupboard with reading books and songbooks in it, and on the wall a series of educational posters depicting family life, peat-cutting and autumnal ploughing. A picture of a city, and one of winter. Varnished floorboards and three very large windows, through which the light would pour in the daytime. Yes, I was most happy with what I saw. In the hallway from where I had come, the floor was tiled, and therefore easily mopped, and on the walls there were coat hooks and twenty cubby holes containing twenty new pairs of small cloth slippers, one pair in each. From the hallway a door leading off into the teacher’s accommodation on the other side, and a steep flight of steps to the loft. My rooms were at the end of the house. There was a kitchen with a great chimney and a stove far too big for one person, moreover a living room with a table, chairs, a bookcase, and an armchair. A small chamber with a bed, a night table and a chair. Apart from the stove, everything was better than I had allowed myself to hope for. The rooms had been heated up during the day. The fire had gone out now, but my father had given me kindling to take with me, which accounted for most of the contents of my duffel bag. I put the schoolroom lamp in the window, thinking that if anyone should come past they would find the place inviting, this January evening on Nørregade. The wind battered the house, but it was solidy built of brick. I put my books in the cupboard in the schoolroom and ate the rest of the packed lunch I had brought with me. There was a smell of fresh woodwork, everything was brand new and ready.
Thinking back, I almost feel envious of that young schoolmistress. In fact, there is no almost about it.
* * *
Now and then, it seems as if I want to fall into a trap. I lay awake last night and felt so embittered. For long periods of time I am able to remind myself to contain the bitterness of my private life so as not to lose my dignity or narrow my horizons. I know people
who can only talk about what has gone wrong and who complain about the offenses caused by others to such an extent that one wishes it were possible to cover one’s ears and run away as one sits there nodding and smiling and trying to lead the conversation in some other direction, and to at least interest them in a piece of cake. But in my darkest moments I understand only too well the kind of misfortune that can leave a person in such a place. Bitterness is a very soft and comfortable armchair from which it is difficult indeed to extract oneself once one has decided to settle in it.
Why was I not allowed to help you when you were dying, Vigand?
Why did you not answer my letter?
His voice, so seldom hesitant, says nothing. I tossed and turned in the bed, until eventually I got up and went downstairs, though I did not light the lamp. That silence, it betrays me.
November 25
To begin with, the children sat and stared at me. There was not a thing to complain about as regards discipline, one could hear a pin drop, but their silence had me bewildered, until it struck me that perhaps it was my Fyn-land accent that was so unfamiliar to them they thought it to be some kind of foreign language.
“Can you understand what I say?” I asked.
“No,” said a girl.
“Then we must sing,” I said.
We sang our way through the days in that early time. They came from the municipal school where they had learned only the Mission hymns, so they were completely unfamiliar with the likes of Fanø, Manø and Romø or Once in Olden Days. They were a lot less humble after they learned that they were to address me using the du form and were not required to spring to their feet when I asked them a question, that we would not be using the cane, and that moreover I encouraged them to ask if there was anything they didn’t understand. “Aren’t you going to be cross soon?” they asked, but it was quite unnecessary.
As in all free schools, we began each day with a hymn, the Lord’s Prayer, and then another hymn. We sang in every lesson. Immediately after morning song we had storytelling, where I told them stories from the Bible or Danish history, about the siege of Copenhagen, about Svend Gønge and Svend Trøst, Cain and Abel, or Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The children made drawings as they listened, and were very fond of it. Afterwards came arithmetic and spelling, and we would chorus the rhymes: B A says ba, B U says bu, B Æ says bæ. But otherwise learning by rote was not allowed. Some of the parents were puzzled by this and feared their children would not be confirmed if they were unable to recite the Ten Commandments and hymns from memory, and there were even a few who took their children out of the school when it was rumored what kind of teaching I practiced. I had several discussions with Peder Møllergaard, who impressed upon me that there was a balance that needed to be kept at all times.
* * *
—
I was fond of those children. I think they were fond of me, too. In an unremarkable kind of way. Only once did anything like deep-felt affection come to expression. It was after a lesson when little Ludvig Ludvigsen asked me to bend forward, and when I did he smoothed his hand over my hair and ran out through the door leaving me astonished and rather overwhelmed at my desk. And when I think about it now, it astonishes me still. Was it something he had been intending to do, or did he just do it? If he were here now, I should like to ask him.
Yes, everything seemed so easy to me. But even in that regard there was a balance to be kept. And it was up to me to keep it. Once, in exuberance at the children’s proficiency and eagerness to learn, I found myself saying to them as we were about to have dictation that anyone with more than seven mistakes would have their ears boxed. None of them ever had more than seven mistakes, and I considered it a joy to be relished by us all that in our school no one would ever be physically punished in any circumstance, not even if the teacher were strict or unfair. I think I wanted to show the children that if the teacher or another adult were ever unfair, another, stronger kind of justice would prevail, and that they were protected by it. But on that day it was as if a fly were buzzing about inside my head, I reached out and snatched it the way I snatched at others that would lead us off into spelling games on the blackboard or physical exercises in the aisle when the weather would not permit us to go outside.
The children were so anxious that over half the class, from the brightest to the dullest, had more than seven mistakes. I was unable to go back on what I had said. In the deepest silence, I went from desk to desk and boxed their ears. I was as gentle as could be: first I smoothed my hand over their cheeks as if to take the sting from what I was about to do, and to make them understand that I didn’t mean it, and then I boxed their ears. I did not hit them hard, but still little Ludvig Ludvigsen fell weeping over his desk, as did several of the girls. At the time, I did not know that love and violence from the same hand is more fear-inducing than violence on its own.
* * *
—
The first thing I did in the morning was light the stove in the schoolroom. Because the peat contained so much sand, the ash pan had to be emptied daily. I teetered outside with it and the chamber pot, my hair but loosely plaited, in my dressing gown and wooden shoes, to the rear of the building where the schoolmistress’s washroom was situated. It was quite an expedition in rain and wind and slush, and I was glad the school was secluded. The nearest neighbor was a hundred meters away. Once I had washed and dressed, I wiped the desks and the window sills and mopped the floor. It was the sort of job I ought properly to have done in the evenings, but normally I was so tired after evening classes and the lecture society and the sports association and whatever else that kept me occupied, that all I could manage was to go home and go straight to bed. I wanted the place to smell fresh when the children came. I wanted it to be a cozy place in which they felt comfortable. We had geraniums in the window, for they too had been in my duffel bag when I arrived: four little cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper. I entrusted the children with looking after them. Indeed, they helped me with as much as they could. The boys carried water in, so I never needed to carry a full bucket, and they filled the peat box for me too, in my rooms as well as the schoolroom.
When the children arrived at eight o’clock the place was nice and warm. They came trudging in their wooden shoes that were heavy with the mud and snow they had picked up along the way, and their legs were often wet to the knee. Many of them lived a long way from the school and had already been hard at work for some time. I kept a good stock of dry socks. Every day, their wet ones would be hung to dry at the stove. They loved to put their dry socks and slippers on before we started. We kept a pot of milk on the stove too, so they could get some warmth inside them. I felt privileged indeed. Sometimes, in the privacy of my mind, I thought of them as own.
* * *
—
All the children I have known are long since grown up. Perhaps because I was only a teacher for such a short time, I remember each and every one so distinctly, and when occasionally during the many years I lived in Give I happened to see one of them, their names would pop from my lips and I would stop in my tracks and clap my hands together with glee. It was not that I tended to think about them ordinarily, but seeing them would call attention to a longing I until then hardly knew was there. After Vigand moved his practice to Thyregod, I have naturally seen them more often. The girls come and show me their babies whenever they give birth, and I can tell that my interest brings them joy. But only a few years from now they will reach the grandmothering age, for in these parts the women start early. The boys work hard. They all work hard. If truth be told, they have little in common with the children they once were. Some of them are dead. Little Ludvig Ludvigsen perished from some peculiar seizure, Jens Thiis fell from the barn loft, and Madeleine Kristoffersen and Jens Jensen died in the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. Oscar Vestergaard disappeared. Of twenty-two children, five are already no more.
Such shifting winds in life. Therein the advantage of
becoming older. One finds oneself with several lives, and may skip from one to another. Every so often it feels like I remember it all. Most probably I cannot.
* * *
The first spring I was there, the children had somehow discovered it was my birthday, and there I was thinking that I would surprise them: I had baked a cake that we were going to share during the lunch break. Only then it turned out they had brought me something. A handful of one and two-øre coins. It was so very seldom that folk had money in their hands. At the grocer’s they bartered for their groceries with eggs and meat, and apart from that most tended to be self-sufficient. “How on earth have you managed to save up such a sum?” I exclaimed, and they laughed secretively and asked me if I had ever seen so much money before. They asked as well what I would like to buy.
I went to Hansen’s grocery. His business is substantial now, as it was becoming then, situated in the old yard with timber stock and stables and storehouses. I had a notion that I might buy myself a blouse, but instead my attention was caught by the paraffin lamp that once again this evening burns in my window. It is such a fine lamp, with its round, frosted dome and brass base.