A Change of Time

by Ida Jessen

  I thought of Vigand, and the fact that we got married, and I found it singular indeed. We hardly knew each other. I had seen him twice when he proposed. Thrice, if his talk on kitchen hygiene is to be included.

  The second time was when the children received their smallpox vaccinations. Vigand came at the last minute. I was commandeered to help. One by one, they stepped up to the desk, and I held their hands while he disinfected the skin on their upper arms. A brisk wipe with a swab of cotton wool. “Go home and tell your mother to give you a bath,” he instructed many. “Now you’ll feel a little jab. Nothing to cry about. There, all finished. Not too bad, was it? And you don’t like chocolate, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t say. Lucky for you, I’ve brought some with me.”

  They were as quiet as mice. For some of them it was probably the first time in their lives they had been given a whole piece of chocolate wrapped up in silver paper, all for themselves. They must have been hoping there was enough to go round.

  When he was done he packed his bag, but instead of leaving he asked if we would mind if he sat at the back of the class and listened. He promised not to cause trouble. The children stared at him gravely, which could seem rude to anyone unfamiliar with them, but they were oblivious to the notion that others could find them interesting. Something that by no means exclusively applies to children.

  We were having arithmetic and had got as far as to the multiplication tables from 2 to 10, which we sat and chanted. We loved to chant. Vigand raised a finger in the air. “Can I ask a question?”

  I nodded.

  “Does anyone here know what naught plus naught plus naught plus naught plus naught is?” he asked. Silence descended, no one dared say a word; the older ones, who would have known, said nothing either. Eventually, little Ludvig Ludvigsen ventured in a trembling voice: “Five?”

  After I had said goodbye to the children I thought he would be on his way. But he was still standing there in the schoolroom when I came back in, and I asked if I could offer him anything. “A cup of coffee,” he said.

  I had to go and light the stove and was afraid he would tire of waiting. When I came back with a tray he was looking in one of the school books he had taken from the glass-fronted cupboard and seemed to be enjoying it. “Go to the ant and be wise,” he read out loud in a measured voice. “What splendid nonsense.”

  He was satisfied with the school, particularly the light that came into the room, the high ceiling, and the ventilation panes in the great windows. I remember him asking about the drinking water and where the washrooms were situated. “A far cry from Kokborg School,” he said. “They shit and drink in the same place there.”

  We drank our coffee. “You’re not as spry as last time I saw you,” he said, and narrowed an eye. “You’re looking a bit peaky. And you’ve lost weight. Can you not keep your food down?”

  The moment he mentioned it, I felt straight away that I had to be sick. I managed to get to the hall, where I grabbed the floor bucket and kicked open the door of my rooms.

  When I came back, he said: “Let me have a look at you.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said after a minute. “You’re not dying.”

  He had very blue eyes, Vigand. They gleamed.

  * * *

  —

  The most puzzling thing to have occurred in my fifty-year life is that he returned two days later. He came striding up Nørregade in a grey suit and hat, and without his doctor’s bag. He had sent the driver to the inn. He wondered if he could come in, and asked whether or not I was aware that my comings and goings were being observed and that while Nørregade at that moment seemed deserted it would soon be common knowledge that he had come to visit. “We can go for a walk if you want,” he said. “Not that it would alter anything.”

  We made an arc around the town and strolled out towards Hastrup.

  He said: “We might as well be married right away, now that we’ve given them something to talk about.” And then he took my hand. “You’ll be a good wife,” he added, as though it were a consolation. Vigand had what they call pudgy fingers. It was odd for such a slender man. They were very thick lower down and tapered thinner at the tips. It was a problem with regard to the wedding ring, he had difficulty finding one that would stay on, and it was out of the question for him to wear it when he was working. Imagine if he were to lose it inside someone. He kept it in a Petri dish in his desk during the daytime, and would put it on when his work was done. Once, it fell off when he was fetching peat from the cellar, and we were unable to find it anywhere. I searched for days, while Vigand retreated into displeasure. It turned up in the garden underneath the dripping eaves when the snow melted in the spring. It was the housemaid who found it, she came in and held it up in triumph. I put it on his breakfast plate and said nothing, looking forward to seeing his face when he came down and found it there. But all he did was put it on, unfold the newspaper, and begin to read.

  * * *

  —

  Vigand preferred a civil marriage, but it was such a nuisance to arrange that we were married in the church at Give instead. We made it a quiet affair, not even Agnete or my parents were there. Vigand procured a bridal bouquet, and when it withered he threw it out.

  We never spoke of what prompted us to marry. There was a grace about him. Without wishing for even the smallest word of gratitude, he assumed to have saved me. He must have allowed for another man’s child being part of the bargain, but even when it turned out there was none, he refrained from comment. I loved him for it, and yet it has often driven me mad with speculation. Why did he take me? Was he really just being chivalrous? Throughout our entire marriage, I have by turns considered either that there was no reason at all, or that there was a reason, which I would surely find, if only I looked hard enough.

  I begged him that we might have children.

  “You can’t have children, as you well know,” he said.

  It was the worst of anything that was said between us. It left a stain on my soul that cannot be erased. I had hoped that Vigand would remove it.

  I had hoped for a caress.

  The tantrums I have thrown.

  April 19, 1929

  I find much pleasure in the hens. When I have been down to open the hatch in the mornings, they dash to the fence and watch me wistfully as I go back to the house. After lunch I let them out of the run, and shortly afterwards they are clucking and scraping all over the garden, except the kitchen garden, which Carl has fenced off. Most have particular friends whose company they prefer. One encounters them unexpectedly in some snug little hiding place or enjoying a dust-bath down by the pond. They love the spring and sunshine. They tidy their feathers as if they were shaking sand from a towel, settle themselves more comfortably and cluck softly to each other. But there are outcasts too. Hilda refers to one as the Brave One, because it seems always to be harried by the others, and whenever she finds the chance she will pick it up in her arms and make a fuss of it, to spite the others and make them envious. In the summer, when the French doors were left open, they would often venture into the dining room to see me. They were the politest of visitors, calling out to ask if they were welcome, and whenever I appeared too abruptly from another room they would scatter and fall over themselves in a rush to be gone.

  Last week, I took the car up to Hedebjerg Farm to ask Inge and Dagmar if they would care for a drive. I have been putting it off for months, telling myself that I ought to take them on a proper trip, for instance to Fakkegrav, where they could visit the sea and have tea at the hotel there. But it seemed so insurmountable. Instead, we took a little jaunt out to Hastrup Pond and visited the mill, where we bought cordial that we drank while sitting on a bench as the wheel turned and turned at our rear. Afterwards we drove home to Rose Cottage. Dagmar and Inge sat out in the garden, and I went down to the hen-house and scooped the newly hatche
d chicks up into a shallow cardboard box. It had given me the whole idea for our trip that day. Indeed, it was to be the highlight. I was so looking forward to showing Inge the chicks that it would be untrue to claim that my motives were entirely unselfish. Cautiously, I placed the box in her lap. Dagmar guided her hand towards them, and Inge’s face instantly lit up in a smile. She felt them with her hands, each and every one. Oh, their little black eyes, and oh, their little cheeps and chirps. It was such a lovely day. I lifted one out of the box and placed it in her hand, and Inge lowered her other hand carefully on top of it like a lid and uttered some quick and whispered sounds. Dagmar leaned over her shoulder and put her cheek to hers, and she too picked a chick up in her hand. Transports of delight. Such a day we had.

  Why do I think of it now? Because Hilda and I had to slaughter three hens today. For some time now they have produced eggs with double yolks. Eggs that have been much too big, with far too much calcium in the shell. And I had determined with certainty which of them it was, having hovered about the nesting boxes and observed their comings and goings. But I had been unable to prevail on myself to do the necessary. This morning when I let them out, one of them was trailing its insides behind it, and the others were giving it a hard time. That settled the matter, and we chopped the heads off the other two as well. Hilda and I had a jolly afternoon. We carried a garden table into the yard, where the fowl were plucked and prepared. Hilda is so very clever with her hands, and did such a fine job. Drawing geese is the best, she tells me, hens the next best. I gave her two to take home with her and kept one for myself. I shall make broth tomorrow.

  * * *

  —

  I have been at the book collection this evening, as on every other during the week, apart from Tuesday, when we are closed. Opening time is from five until nine. In addition, we are open on Saturday afternoons between two and five.

  The days spent at home at Rose Cottage are delightful, but when evening comes I prefer to be at the books. Now it is properly the spring, not only when the sun shines, but also when the afternoons draw to a close and twilight falls. The boys play marbles on the footpath to the church, and the further away from winter we get, the more intricate and wide-reaching their games become. They have told me there can be several hundred marbles involved at a time. Like their fathers before them, they collect the lead seals from the grocer Hansen’s sacks of field seed and take them to Martin Dreyer, who owns the necessary forceps, and have their marbles made by him. On such an evening, when a blackbird sings from the roof of the inn, and another replies from the grocer Rosenstand’s roof, one may think nothing to be lovelier than a little town with its high street and shops, its children and all the homes whose lamps are lit in the windows, for outside the town there is only the very dark land.

  * * *

  —

  Our book collection is not fine by any stretch of the imagination. It is housed in a space for which no other use could be found. I have seen pictures of high-ceilinged library rooms with reading desks and a dimness illuminated by green reading lamps, made for the very purpose of absorption. I should very much like the people of Thyregod to see such a room. When I first took up the position, Peder Møllergaard impressed upon me that no means were available to squander, but he might just as well have saved his breath. One hardly needed to examine the accounts to understand that barely a krone had been spent in years, and that the collection had in recent decades for the most part been extended only by gifts from people who could not bring themselves to throw out a volume. Much as I left Vigand’s books behind for the new physician, so people have deposited their rubbish here. The greatest culprits have been the various pastors, betrayed by their names that are written inside. Pastor Grell, too, has divested himself of much godly reading material. I imagine these bequeathments to be the result of spring cleaning. In short, the junk that has accumulated here can hardly be estimated. Not to mention the dirt. Dusty would be a sorely inadequate characterization of the place when I first started, and many of the books were so filthy one could scrape the grime from their covers with a knife. I have burned many volumes in the stove because of the health hazard alone. The lot has been cleaned: shelves and books, ceiling, walls, and floor. Before going home at night, I mop the floor, but even airing the room once a day can work wonders.

  I have been greatly helped by consulting The Library Journal and Vejle Central Library, which I have visited on several occasions and whose staff have provided me with instruction and lent me manuals on the correct procedures for cataloguing and lending, as well as other materials concerning a library’s day-to-day running. They even sent out a traveling librarian, who helped me to set out the books according to the decimal system and to divide up the fiction, so that there are now separate shelves for children’s books, poetry, and drama, and moreover for handbooks and works of reference that may only be consulted on the premises.

  It awakened a certain interest in our otherwise so unheeded collection that I began to clear out and catalogue, and even be open at times when people were able to come. Peder Møllergaard also took an interest in the matter. When I asked the parish council for money for filing boxes and registers, he commissioned Haagensen the cabinet maker to construct a desk of oak with drawers and cupboards and two inbuilt filing boxes, and besides that two large reading tables, one with partitions at each end and side, allowing four people to sit and read and yet remain undisturbed by one another, and when the desk and the tables had been installed I invited the parish council and the members of the Civic and Tradesmen’s Association to come and see the place, and demonstrated the principles of book shelving, the filing cards and the new system of borrowers’ cards and book slips that I had acquired from the library in Vejle. I also showed them the register of books, in which not a single new purchase had been entered since 1921. They wandered about and looked at the half-empty shelves. I didn’t tell them how much I had incinerated or thrown out. My feeling was that they would be better convinced by lack of quantity than by lack of quality, and that they would come to doubt my judgement if I told them about the many volumes I had eliminated.

  The result of their visit is that I have been given a sum of money by the parish council and the Civic and Tradesmen’s Association, to be spent on new books. They would like a modern collection that is in keeping with the times. They asked if I was able to bind the books myself so that we might save the expense of a professional. I am able, albeit with difficulty. Agnete learned how to do it when she was a young woman, and I watched her. That forgotten knowledge comes back to me in drips. I began by repairing the oldest and tattiest volumes, and gradually I have ventured into new bindings from scratch. I stand at home in the scullery of Rose Cottage with such work.

  * * *

  —

  Last spring the garden was left to itself. Carl tells me it is time now to remedy the matter, and he says he will help me. He came yesterday and dug up the kitchen garden, and the weather was so warm we could sit with our coffee in the nook by the wash-house and the peat-house. The hens were out enjoying themselves in the sunshine. I had baked some shortbread.

  As we sat there, Carl said he would like to live here at Rose Cottage with Dagmar and Inge after his father dies.

  “What would you do with the place?” I asked.

  “Keep bees,” he answered.

  “Is it a good place for bees?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father’s not ill, is he?” I asked after a pause.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied deliberately, as if he were not quite sure. But then one never can be sure.

  May 2

  The grocer Rosenstand is to be married. The town has been a babble of chatter for weeks, and now it has been announced, the date fixed for June 1. He is so kind towards me that I think he must feel guilty. There is so much talk of it. It is not common to marry at such an advanced age. Next year he will be sixty, and Kirsten
Vinge, his wife-to-be, is soon approaching fifty. She is the daughter of the former bailiff from Vester, but although she is fine and dainty in appearance, no one had ever imagined she would be married, for she is lame and has always lived on her own in a little house by the road between Thyregod and Vester. Ever since she was quite young, she has made her living as a seamstress. I once had a pair of dresses made by her. Her living room was so bare, and a sheet of loose linoleum covered the floor. It was an oddly cold and dismal home. In the middle of the room was her sewing machine, and there was hardly a piece of furniture besides. It was indeed a trial to be fitted by her, for she is so very exacting and takes an age in everything she does. One stands until racked with fatigue, with pins pricking one’s skin, while she crawls about the floor adjusting her work with cold, thin hands. But Rosenstand earns more than enough to keep them both, and Hilda says she has already given up her sewing. They seem to be happy, and quite indifferent to the gossip they must surely be aware has been sweeping through the town.

  * * *

  —

  I have only now dug up the fruit trees that were gnawed away by the hares last winter and put them on the waste pile. Again, Carl was here to help me. He came with a greeting from his father who said there were some new fruit trees for me at Hedebjerg if I wished for some, and so I drove up there this afternoon. He had put aside six in all: two Victoria plum, Guldborg and Filippa apple, Grise-Bonne and August pear. There was not enough room in the car, so he drove them home for me, and planted them too. The only thing I had to do was hold them straight. While he was fetching more water, the thatcher came driving along the road, and when he saw me standing beside one of the small trees he shouted over the hedge: “Those wud’nae bae love apples?”