Bror og søster (læseprøve) af Katrine Marie Guldager

Katrine Marie Guldager

Katrine Marie Guldager The Køge chronicle

New volume in the acclaimed family chronicle!

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politikens Forlag

www.kmguldager.dk

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about THE AUTHOR Katrine Marie Guldager is the author of numerous poems, short stories, novels and children’s books. Her books have been translated into Swedish, Norwegian, German and English.

Currently she is working on her extensive chronicle based in Køge, Denmark of which the first four volumes have been published.

Katrine Marie Guldager has received numerous grants and awards, including the National Arts Foundation’s Scholarship and the Critics’ Award.

Katrine Marie Guldager grew up in Denmark, but lived with her parents in Zambia for three years. She received her C.Phil. the same year she graduated from Copenhagen’s Writer’s School.

ASYMPTOTE One of her most prestigeous literary achievements was when her short story “We have already fixed a price” was included in the winter issue of Asymptote, the American journal for translated fiction, when they hosted a special feature on Danish fiction 2015.

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The Køge chronicle

THE WOLF

LITTLE HEART

A story of the beginning of a family, set around the time of World War II; a story of light and darkness, love and hate.

Growing up, Leonora and Henry are doted upon by their entire wellfunctioning suburban family. But sometimes, neither love nor the best intentions are enough. Not all children are good and not all parents love their children equally.

At the centre of LITTLE HEART stands Peter, the father og Leonora and Henry, as he is abandoned by his wife, who suddenly finds herself in a Virginia Woolf-ian crisis - existentially as well as artistically. In an attempt to break free from her family obligations and to find herself, she leaves her family and their home town behind in order to seek an outlet for her artistic ambitions. She finds it in her old beau Ib Berthelsen, and Copenhagen. But can she leave her children behind? And can Peter live on without her?

Published 2012

Published 2010 255 pages

208 pages

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THE NEW ERA

THE DEATH OF PETER

In the sixties, the new winds that blow through society leave no one completely unscathed – and Henry and Leonora are no exception.

Henry, has just finished his military service and heads back to the capital in order to join the growing hippie movement. Meanwhile, Leonora struggles in the no-man’s land between the changing times and her passive-aggressive, conservative family.

The year is 1972 and Leonora and Henry’s lives are strongly influenced by the politically turbulent, liberal times.

Meanwhile, their relationship is shaken as Leonora finds that their father Peter died under circumstances that will change the course of the whole family forever.

Published 2014 207 pages

Published 2013 272 pages

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Denmark’s new family chronicle

The Køge family chronicle begins with the meeting of Peter and Lilly on Nørregade. They meet in 1938, marry in 1939 and their first child, Henry, is born in 1940, the day after the German occupation of Denmark. The Køge chronicle tells the story of the family founded by Peter and Lilly. In the first two volumes, ‘The Wolf’ and ‘Little Heart’, Peter and Lilly are the protagonists of the story, but hereafter their children, Henry and Leonora, take the story further. But already on Peter and Lilly’s wedding night, something happens that will have great consequences for the destiny of the family from Køge. The wedding night goes like this: Before Peter fell asleep, he thought about that spring day the year before, when, walking across the square, he’d compared women to flowers. Now he thought happily: I’ve plucked my flower! Lilly lay on her side of the bed, and thought: that wasn’t so bad. Then also she fell asleep, but no more than a few hours later, she woke with a start. The darkness was massive, a voice whispered: who are you? Lilly tossed and turned in the moonlight, she didn’t understand the question, and she didn’t have an answer: who I am? Óne empty eye stared out into the darkness, and many years later, when Lilly was to describe what had happened that night, she said it was that very night she learnt the meaning of fear. Fear spread through her whole body, and finally it manifested itself there, like a big, hungry wolf. As time went by, Lilly became someone who gathered identity like other people once gathered bits of firewood in the forest during the War. Lilly gathered bits of identity in the manner she conducted herself, bits of identity in her choice of confidantes, and she found identity in being a housewife, in liv-

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ing on Marievej. After a while, she had collected enough firewood to build a little bonfire to warm herself and her soul. And with flames reflecting in her eyes, she could say: Thát there is the person I am!

But there was never very much firewood for her bonfire, and the

wolf was never very far away. Even when she sat and warmed herself at her little bonfire, she could hear it prowling in the woods.

Lilly begins her marriage to Peter without knowing who she is, and the wolf is both a threatening figure of her imagination and a real, live wolf Peter and Lilly keep locked in the attic. Peter and Lilly lead their lives believing that – if they never talk about the wolf – then it doesn’t exist. But of course the wolf escapes, indeed, it escapes the very night the couple are invited to the home of Ib Berthelsen, an art connoisseur, who is in love with Lilly. Lilly is not in love with him, perhaps only in those possibilities he has to offer. For Lilly is immensely bored by the life of a housewife in Køge, and by the beginning of Volume II, Lilly has left both Peter and Køge for Copenhagen. She wants to know the answer to the question: Who am I? And she believes that art can help her find an answer.

Peter is alone in Køge, and Volume II, ‘Little Heart’, opens like this: The story begins with a sound, with the wind tugging in the branches of the apple trees outside the windows. It begins with a man reaching out for his soon to be ex-wife, for her chilling words: the story begins, because the space beside him is empty. The man closes his eyes, and the desperation within the man drives him out onto an imaginary sea, thére his body knows what it longs for; it longs to sink down to the bottom of the ocean, like an unwanted cargo, something that has been pushed over the railing in haste: he can feel himself sinking deeper and deeper. But all at once, he is suspended, floating in the water. At the edge of a deep sea reef, he perceives the shape of small shoals of fish, little shadows, which want to tell him something good, something wonderful. In a rush, the letters take form,

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only to be gone again. Meaning keeps splintering, forming new patterns, he finds himself there, on the rim of significance, and he’s glad to be there.

But soon his body begins to rise up towards wakefulness, up to the little, locked bedroom and that fearful, empty space beside him. He moves up towards the higher levels of consciousness, and now that flicker of meaning becomes a problem. In fact, it scares him, and he wakes in that state of terror, which had reigned throughout the many days before; he wakes with a scream just barely suppressed in his throat.

But actually the story has already begun.

For the story began in that summer that had just gone by – it began in the summer of 1956. The whole day long, the man’s wife, Lilly, had been bathing in the sun on the beach with their daughter, Leonora, but even though the weather was wonderfully warm, Lilly was freezing deep down inside.

Finally, she had gotten up decisively, walked up to the house, packed a suitcase and taken Little-Ib by the hand; she had fled Leonora’s questions.

There are three siblings in the Køge chronicle, but the relationship between Henry and Leonora, born in 1940 and 1942, respectively, is plagued by bitter rivalry from the start. Henry hates the fact that he gets a little sister; not only does he want to keep his mother for himself, he just doesn’t get what he needs from his mother. Lilly is concerned that there is something wrong with Henry, and she confides in her neighbour, Ellen, who takes the boy to see the local priest. The visit goes like this: A bronze-cast sign on the door confirmed that the priest was available for consultations daily between one- and two ‘o clock. It was a quarter past one. Ellen knocked on the door. Henry was standing beside her, quietly and obediently holding her hand. When the priest came to the door, Ellen introduced the boy, adding:

“I trust we’re not coming at an inconvenient hour?”

The priest shook his head and explained that he was tired. He thought:

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my parish keeps me busy. Ellen sat in his little office – still wearing her overcoat and hat – and described the problem at hand, and the priest became gravely concerned for the well-being of his young parishioner.

He offered him a sweet, and said: “The two of us are going to get on just fine.”

And true enough, throughout the following week the priest spent very nearly every minute of his spare time with Henry. The priest may have seemed somewhat arbitrary in his questioning of the boy, and one could ask oneself, whether there was any method to his manner at all. But no one could deny his marked experience in judging the human soul, nor could anyone deny that he tackled his task with gusto. And so he took Henry into the innermost sanctum of the church, down into its dampest rooms, where he told the boy some stories from the Bible. He took Henry to a funeral and a wedding, he took the boy along on trips, and, just as Miss Eigaard had said to herself, the priest reiterated: let the little children come to me! And his soul swelled with joy. But, unfortunately, that judgement, which fell in the priest’s little office after a week of thorough consideration, was plain. Both Lilly and Ellen were summoned, and what the priest had to declare at the end of his little speech, was exactly what they’d both feared most: with the same quiet confidence of doctor confirming the lack of an eye or an arm of a patient, he said: “It’s just as you’ve feared. The boy has no conscience.”

I have always wondered what it was like growing up during the War, having to live with the spectre of it all around you – without being able to understand it – and not being able to ask either, because the grown-ups weren’t inclined to talk about it. For Henry, war was something very threatening, something that would affect his imagination for many years to come. In Volume II of the chronicle, the soldiers burst right into his bedroom. It is Spirits-Søren, who tells him about both the First- and Second World War:

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A lot could be said about Spirits-Søren, but he was a good story-teller. So good, in fact, that Henry lay awake at night, watching the stories unfold before him, exactly as Spirits-Søren had described it. He saw the French soldiers standing there in the sun in their red trousers, fingering their belts, he heard them mumble a few phrases of French, and there he saw a German Pickelhelm sticking up over the edge of the trenches, revealing that soldier, who bore it. Everywhere, he saw men digging trenches; the smell of the soil was unmistakable. And all at once, it seemed as if they charged into his very room, as if they walked straight through the walls, burst through the bricks, and, with bits of tapestry stuck to their steel helmets and cement clinging to their felt-grey uniforms, they barricaded themselves on either side of the bed. They rose up tall, yelled their commands, fired their guns, ducked down behind the bed again; they screamed in pain, whenever they were wounded.

It was never ending.

When the soldiers of The First World War weren’t fighting, they sat in

their trenches to write letters to their loved-ones, fiancées and utterly unknowing family members back home, and they gave Henry a sense of how love becomes embodied in the written word: in the capacity of a loop of ink to entwine óne heart to another he believed he could see the very reason why war was never to be the permanent state of the world after all.

But no sooner had the secluded exhaustion of óne group of trench sol-

diers abated, than the soldiers of the Second World War stepped up to the plate – even more bitter, more desperate, than their half-dead predecessors. And as his bedroom wall already had a hole in it, the soldiers of the Second World War could march right in – without wasting any energy on breaking it down; chins up, guns loaded, they could remain intent upon entering Henry’s bedroom without suffering any casualties. Luckily, the two groups of soldiers were invisible to 11

one another, so luckily, the soldiers of the Second World War could take up their posts without disturbing the soldiers of the First World War. And so the German soldiers, bearing their eagles on their breasts, their shiny collar tips and shoulder straps, marched in and occupied a spot behind Henry’s desk; the British soldiers slipped into the cupboard, and, after tossing out Henry’s clothes, they set up camp and made themselves at home.

By Volume III of the chronicle, ‘The New Age’, we have reached ‘The Summer of Love’, and Henry joins the fledgling hippie community in Denmark. Lilly tries to establish herself as a painter, but after a visit to Køge, she inadvertently lets out the wolf, which follows her to her exclusive home on Copenhagen’s Bredgade, where she now lives with Ib Berthelsen: She arrived at Copenhagen Main Station without noticing the animal following her at a safe distance. She didn’t notice the snarling noise coming from a point somewhere behind her. The only thing occupying her mind was getting home as fast as possible, so she could read that letter, which had been sent her. She was so eager to get home, that she didn’t even stop at the bakers for a litre of milk. Her ideas had to be expelled at once.

Both Ib Berthelsen and Little-Ib (who wasn’t so little at all) were in, when she opened the door and let the wolf into her home. She called ‘Hallo!’, and both men appeared in their respective doorways.

She said: “Lunch?”

But before anyone could answer, she said: “There’s just one thing I have to do first!”

She could feel it; she was standing on the verge of a ‘creative explosion’.

She excused herself, went up to her room and fixed a piece of canvas onto her easel with the utmost care. With the utmost care, she studied her brushes and mixed her paints, her nose practically touching the palette: so deep had she retreated into her own world that she started suddenly upon

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hearing a growl behind a couple of cardboard boxes in the corner. She put down her brushes at once, walked to the boxes, but hesitated in mid stride.

Was it really a growl she’d heard? It was probably just her imagination! She stood completely still, listened to her breathing calm down. Dear God! Could it be true that painting was such a loaded act for her that she began hearing things that didn’t exist? Apparently so! She went back to her easel and gathered up her brushes, smiling nervously: the wolf couldn’t possibly have followed her here from Køge; the wolf belonged back home, in Køge, in that ghastly existence she’d long since left behind her. She lit a cigarette, put her fear behind her, and was once more so caught up in her work that an atom bomb could have exploded in the entrance hall without her noticing.

Leonora has a somewhat strained relationship to her mother, as she has never really forgiven her for leaving her behind in Køge. One day, when Leonora visits her mother in Copenhagen, Lilly forgets to pick her up at the train station, as agreed. Leonora is disappointed, but also glad to see her mother.

As they walked over Kongens Nytorv, Leonora took her mother’s hand, feeling the love stream between them like a soft, precious purl. She was so happy she almost stumbled over a little poodle out for a walk with a lady on the square. For Lilly, their visit was already coming to a close. For in her mind’s eye, she imagined the patterns she would paint when evening fell. They hadn’t walked more than a few metres down Strøget, before Lilly suddenly turned on her heel, promptly announcing that they had to visit a gallery on Bredgade. It was not that Leonora had anything against taking a detour, nor did she have anything against paintings, it was just that suddenly an inkling of truth smouldered so terribly, shamefully within her. In a single, painful moment, Leonora realized she would never be able to hold her mother’s attention beyond those few, short intervals, when Lilly didn’t have the strength to think of her art.

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Henry experiments with drugs and on Gammeltorv in Copenhagen he tries taking LSD: On Gammeltorv they sat down on a bench. Henry kept watch for Flip-Frede, but he couldn’t see him anywhere. The acid trip started to take effect. It was like a big film projector was being switched on. Henry looked at Thorvald, who was sitting next to him on the bench, and hey, look at that! Thorvald was changing form! Thorvald hovered over the bench, and every time you tried to grab him, he veered a little further off! Did he say something?

It sounded strange, distorted, and Henry wanted to touch his cheek, but suddenly everything became rhythm; Thorvald was not only hovering, he was óne, big, warm rhythm, the bench was rhythm, Henry was rhythm, and Henry shouted out loud with glee: “Can you feel it, Thorvald?! It’s the rhythm of the universe!”

Henry thought he could hear some distant laughter, and he too, wanted to laugh out loud, the universe was connected, man, it was merely the consciousness of mankind that was too backward to understand the magnitude of it all! And no wonder you called it getting ‘high’ – you were elevated above it all – the environment released so many sensory impulses, so much information, that it would take a whole lot of people on a whole lot of LSD to receive it all. And all at once, Henry could see it before him: all the peoples of the world on óne, big communal trip, together, hand in hand, receiving the universe; everything made perfect sense.

Peter is an old-fashioned man from the 1950s who may best be described as being the opposite of a man ‘adept to change’. Even after Lilly has left him, he keeps on loving her. He is dutiful and loyal, and he insists upon hosting Lilly’s 50th birthday for the whole family. At the birthday party, Peter reads a love poem

by Molbech for his ex-wife, and when his reading is over, the guests feel embarrassed on his behalf: 14

When Peter was done with the poem, an awkward silence fell in the room.

Peter brushed a feather off his suit and looked up, but nobody met his gaze. Was it possible he hadn’t understood that Lilly had left him; that it was completely inappropriate to read a love poem for his ex-wife, when

she was sitting right next to her new husband? The guests seemed uncertain how to move on from where Molbech’s saturated lines had left off. It was hoped that Peter himself would pick up the lead, that hé would carry the proceedings further, but Peter seemed intent upon dusting feathers off his jacket. Maren Katrine was the first to recover. She considered intervening, either by interrupting Peter’s speech (stand behind him and lightly rest a hand on his shoulder), or by brushing the whole business off with a laugh (hah, hah, what a charming idea, Peter. Goodness me, what a beautiful poem that was!). But Maren Katrine hesitated.

It seemed as if the entire agreement underlying their congenial gathering had come under fire. And these polite, good folk from Køge had no idea what to do. Should one intervene? Or would that make everything worse? But that was just it; just what nobody ever knew. Even the most banal social gathering was founded upon a tacit agreement as to how the occasion would be conducted. You said yes to this agreement the moment you accepted the invitation; it was thís agreement, you reinforced, when you arrived, sat yourself down at the table and asked questions like:

“Have you also just arrived?”

“Could you pass me the sauce?”

“Shall I hold, whilst you serve?”

What you’re really saying is: yes.

You said yes to a social pact, you said yes to upholding it, glossing over it, letting things run as smoothly as possible, and, accordingly, no one

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was pleased, when the pact suddenly becomes apparent, because it’s broken; no one cared to have a broken bone stuck up under their noses.

For óne breach could so easily lead to another. And we don’t squeeze ourselves into our party clothes for the sake of seeing a grown man bleed.

If it can be said that Henry’s weakness is the fact that he lacks a conscience, then Leonora’s weakness is the fact that she cannot bear injustice. In Volume I, she sets fire to her childhood home, and in Volume III, she sets fire to a boys’ home, because she and her friends had seen how badly the boys were treated.

In Volume IV, Peter dies, and his death unfolds like this: It felt harsh, unfair, that Peter should die in his fifties, but in fact, death had already taken over his heart the year after Lilly moved to Copenhagen. Ever since, he’d longed for her, longed for her so much that he’d strained after the merest hope, the tiniest intonation in her voice (like a flower straining towards the sun), until at last, he met the limit of his reach (the stalk broke). At her 50th birthday party, Peter again felt the scope of that love he’d come to know over the years, he felt how everything within him became warm and open, and this had given death free reign.

It was Leonora who found him.

She’d gone down to Marievej to help Peter with the household. She’d been waiting in the lounge, and was therefore surprised to find him lying on the bed, apparently sleeping. Very carefully, she put a hand on his arm; she felt he was cold. She looked into her father’s dead eyes, and she felt certain that several pieces of furniture in the bedroom shook, just a little, she was certain that the order of things, which we take for granted every day, had just come to an end. Her first thought was to telephone Klaus, but then she remembered he was at a meeting in Ejby. She looked at her father again,

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and then sat down next to his bed. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t, she still didn’t know what had happened. Was the world about to crumble?

Was shé going to die now? Was this the last shock, or the first? When the shaking had subsided, her brain managed to convince her that some mistake had occurred. That some or other mistake was to blame for making the world stop. She held her breath.

He had said it so many times: “You and me, Little Heart.”

Leonora sat down on the edge of the bed again, forced herself to breathe deeply and wait for Peter to wake up, so she could laugh about it all; but nothing happened. And it was all the more painful that the world outside kept giving off little hints that time had not stopped, that the world – despite Peter’s death – remained on its utterly erratic course of rotation through the universe; its unfathomable chaos of life and death and destruction.

Leonora was sitting on the edge of the bed, despising those tiny, despicable signs that the world was cranking up again; sounds were returning.

A neighbour slammed his door, she heard voices down on the street, the world both continued and stopped – it solidified – and that sorrow, which came, was much more than she could contain, much more than her soul could hold, and so it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the dead man in the bed – the meaning of the dead man in the bed – shattered her soul to pieces, in the same manner that a single fact could destroy an entire philosophy of life; a language, a memory. It was like a meteor landing in soft brain tissue; she heard a sizzling sound, like something burning. She heard a little girl calling to her father: What shall I do now, she asked, for she had always sought his advice, even though she’d long since grown up. And because the dead man in the bed didn’t answer, the little girl pulled back, hid behind a door, unable to cry, burning, unable to understand death, to acknowledge it and Peter, and say: I know you. I am one person, who is alive; you are another person, who is dead. And because it was so entirely impossible for Leonora to embrace that little girl in the red polka-dot dress, because death

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was so impossible for her to embrace, she lived with her shattered soul for many years; her sorrow was drawn out and out, and folk would be wont to say: But haven’t you gotten over it yet?

Folk meant well. Also other people have lost their fathers and mothers and partners and brothers and sisters and neighbours and rabbits; folk were concerned, and yet the little girl in the red polka-dot dress was still sitting behind the door, perhaps she died herself. Perhaps her eyelashes became dusty, perhaps her dress was decomposing. Whatever the case may be, Leonora could not be reconciled with the shape of her sorrow, which, as we know, can manifest itself in one of two ways: either it’s hard as flint, or, it’s capacious, soft and cool; sorrow, one of mankind’s opportunities to connect people across boundaries, life and language. And why? For in truth, sorrow is the glue that holds our tired, old world together. Because we’re all destined to lose the people we love. Because we will all lose our parents. And our children.

Henry gets married to Birgitte. They move into a communal home in Hellerup and are expecting their second child. Leonora is married to Klaus, but is desperately unhappy about her continued childlessness. The two siblings are deeply troubled by the death of their father, but when Henry is kicked out of home by Birgitte, because she suspects she may be lesbian, Henry breaks down. He goes to the Istegade district near Copenhagen Main Station, where he hooks up with an old flame and thinks about starting up trade as a Heroin dealer. He is drunk, desperate and utterly miserable, when he kills another man, Big-Jan, in selfdefence, and lands up in prison.

At the beginning of Volume V, ‘Brother and sister’, Henry is released from prison.

Leonora is still living in Køge and has borne her first child to Klaus, but when

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Henry reveals that he has cheated his sister out of a large sum of money in connection with their father’s death, she is furious. She swears that she wants nothing more to do with Henry – but it’s hard to be rid of one’s family. And it is hard to get rid of the wolf, which has now been inherited by Henry.

Katrine Marie Guldager, 2015

***************

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❤❤❤❤❤ “So intricately constructed, so sophisticated, so enter-

❤❤❤❤❤❤

taining. God, this author

- Alt for Damerne

can write!”

- Politiken

❤❤❤❤❤

“We enthusiastically

Katrine Marie Guldager

await what is next to

has written a beautifully

come from Katrine Marie

rounded, explained, hu-

Guldager”

morous and sinister trilogy about the family from Køge

- TV2

- Politiken

“A pleasure to read. Guldager

«««««

has written a novel that (...)

– Berlingske Tidende

from another millennium.”

seems like an orgy of poetry

- Kristeligt Dagblad

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❤❤❤❤❤❤

«««««

“The first three books were

“A fantastic reading experience [that] fills

excellent, but the fouth one in the

one with a fierce joy: To think that such a

series burns with a fire that

great read comes right from our own back-

is unparalleled in Danish fiction.“

yard! The Køge Chronicle is quickly becoming

- Politiken

a masterpiece of modern Danish prose.”

- Ekstra Bladet

“Full of literary qualities … From the bottom of my little heart I highly recommend it!”

❤❤❤❤

- Litteratursiden.dk

- Politiken

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Extract

THE WOLF by ©Katrine Marie Guldager & Lindhardt & Ringhof, 2010 ©Translated from the Danish by Lindy Falk van Rooyen,

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Leonora was not an easy child. At the age of nine she declared to her mongrel dog that the only thing she really wanted in this life was to kill her brother. But this story begins long before. It begins before Leonora began to think in this way, it begins long before Leonora was ever born, which she very nearly wasn’t at all. The story begins before her family transformed into that little core of regret it was to become; before her mother slowly but surely turned into a wolf.

The story about Leonora begins one fine spring day in 1938, when her father decided to spend his entire fortune on buying a house in Køge. No sooner had he received the keys, than he declared to the estate agent that it was time to find a wife. On the way over to his new house, he flirted with both the baker’s girl and the lady who served him at the bank. He tipped his hat, and mused that it was best to be generous from the start; rather one flower too many to pluck, than one too few. He was not a handsome man. All through his youth, he had been quite certain that his appearance would be that obstacle posing the greatest challenge to finding a wife; no one would ever be able to love a man with a nose so big you could navigate a journey along its contours, no one would ever be able to love and admire his right eye, which drooped onto his chin, and dripped to boot. When he was young man, he thought in this way, but no longer. If a girl really couldn’t see past his nose and his drooping eye, then she wasn’t the right girl for him.

He walked to the town square, stopped at the tobacconist’s shop, and bought himself a newspaper. He rolled it up and tucked it under his arm. He swung his briefcase cheerfully. His body was light and agile as a dancer’s. There was an unintended tug at the waist of his long overcoat, but there was something refined, something coquettish about him.

The new house was on Marievej. The key fit in the door, and as Peter let himself in, he felt as if he was being sucked into its midst, as if there had been an unequal pressure within. As if the house had been waiting; waiting to

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be lived in. Peter took off his overcoat, deposited his shoes in the entrance, and walked around on his grey-stockinged feet, sinewy and elastic, like a bird’s, his big toe stuck out askew. This he had dreamed of ever since he was just a lad: Letting himself in; letting himself into his own house.

Peter cherished the sight of the rooms inside that had just been cleaned that morning. He opened the door leading out onto the garden and looked at the newly planted apple trees with glee; the pressure had equaled itself out. He started and spun on his heels. Was there someone else in the house? There did not seem to be. The cleaning woman had left her bucket and broom standing in the kitchen, and Peter stowed them away in the narrow, dusty cupboard under the stairs that led up to the first floor. He knew the cleaning woman well. She was kin to his closest colleague in the office. He even thought: why not get together with her? She was nice, and in the marrying age. But Peter was looking for a woman who wanted more from life than scrubbing floors. And she must definitely not be like my mother, he thought.

It happened one evening in April.

Peter had gone for a walk on Nørregade, when he spotted a girl on the other side of the road. She had a small, black frizzy-haired dog on a leash. She was neat and pretty, yet there was something strangely displaced about her face, as if it consisted of two halves that our Dear Lord had assembled in a rush; two halves, of which the one was flushed and mature like a woman’s, and the other was soft and undefined like a child’s. Displaced. This was the word that hovered as Peter silently extended her his hand. So many other women he knew were sweet, funny and friendly, but this one was strangely displaced.

Her hair was newly styled, her clothes fit her perfectly. Her smile was dazzling and a little crooked, mysterious.

Peter had two younger sisters (who originally were one), who were charged with gathering intelligence on the young woman and her family. The two sisters lived at home in the townhouse on the square, and although they were now grown women, for Peter, they would always be a pair of little girls. He

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still called them Miss Light and Miss Darkness—just as he always had—and that’s exactly what they were: The one was light and optimistic to such a degree that it offended most people. Whilst the other was dark, reserved, and convinced that life was a shrouded, narrow path that led directly to Hell. The two sisters couldn’t bear to be apart for more than a few minutes at a time; apart they lost their equilibrium, become dizzy and dazed, which merely confirmed an age-old truth of yore: That light can only exist in the face of darkness. And the other way round. Luckily, they were both very fond of their elder brother, so when he announced that he had found the girl he wished to marry, they were delighted. Or rather: Miss Light was delighted.

Miss Darkness believed it a sure sign that the one thing she had feared most, was about to happen: First, her brother would move out of home, then Miss Light would go, and, in the end, she would be left all alone with their sick old mother, who demanded all and gave nothing in return.

Both sisters worked like busy little bees, they buzzed from friend to friend, gathering information. Miss Light even knew someone who worked at the telephone exchange. But nobody had anything bad to say about the girl their brother had fallen for. On the contrary. Not only had she done a typing course, she had something else that folk like to call: A backbone.

Miss Light delivered the first letter to that woman, who would turn out to be Leonora’s mother. Lilly’s red-haired, ruddy-faced father opened the door to receive the envelope, which he instinctively felt to be some kind of ill omen.

For some years now, he had lived alone with his daughter, and for some years now, she had taken care of him, and made sure that their little house in town was neat and tidy. Karl stood with the envelope in his hand, realizing without a shadow of doubt that its white surface was no proof of its innocence. Rather the opposite.

He wondered for a moment if it wouldn’t be best to simply burn it, but this would probably be discovered, he thought, and he’d be in even more trouble than before. He gave the young girl bringing the envelope to his door a long,

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hard stare. Then he wiped his nose in his shirt-sleeve, closed the door, and hitched up his pants.

“Lilly!” he yelled. His daughter answered from the kitchen, where she and the housemaid were busy clearing away the dishes from that meal, which father and daughter had just eaten in the dining room. Karl cast one more glance at the envelope, and although he had always known that this day would come, he was caught off guard, filled with regret. Was it now, already?

So soon! He sank into a chair in the darkened dining room. Since his wife’s death, he and Lilly had been alone, and since his wife’s death, he had consoled himself with the thought that at least he still had Lilly, a sweet, good girl, who had helped to keep the grief at bay. But what if she were to move out? Then the grief would certainly return. It would wash over him, and wash away everything with it, like a tidal wave; it would sweep him so far out to sea that he would never find solid ground beneath his feet again.

Till now, he had done what he could to avoid thinking about his wife’s untimely death. He had imagined he could keep the burgeoning tidal wave at bay with silence. He and Lilly had tacitly agreed that they would never speak of the core of the family that now was gone. They sat at the dinner table keeping a tidal wave at bay; a whole tidal wave of grief and despair. It was amazing indeed that they succeeded at all. But now it was over. If his daughter really began to show an interest in young men, if she really started to go out with them, he would no longer be able to keep that tidal wave at bay.

Then he would have to give up, let it wash over him, carry him off to sea, where he would swim and swim to no avail.

Lilly came into the dining room, put a hand on her father’s shoulder, and asked: “What is the matter, father?”

Karl handed her the letter as if it were handing her an ill tiding—a death sentence, a writ of summons—and the girl hurried upstairs with her loot.

She huddled far into the deepest corner of the bed, for in years gone by, her

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bed had been that place, where she felt safe; embraced. It was a place some people associate with their mother; someone, who can contain life’s competing emotions. Lilly called to her little dog, which, in flagrant opposition to house rules, was allowed to jump up onto the bed beside her.

She read the letter and felt a blush rise to her cheeks. Someone had taken an interest in her. Imagine that! Lilly folded the letter into the envelope again, stretched her body out onto the bed, and let the back of her hand rest upon her forehead, for love was not only mixed with a rush of joy, a bubbling expectation, it also involved a certain degree of self-confidence, a desire to play that role that was expected of her. If you read women’s magazines—and Lilly did—there was a whole range of roles to be played. After her mother had died, there was no one to help her separate the chafe from the corn, and Lilly’s conception of love was a medley of things she could read in magazines, or things she had seen and heard, like the kitchen maid’s travails, and, not least of which, anything she could gather in the way of fantasy. Nevertheless, she knew what was to be done: she must return the letter to Miss Light, and make this girl understand that she was not interested.

Peter was disappointed. Part of him felt like a victim of the gravest injustice, and he demanded that heaven, earth, and especially Fate be duty-bound to review this—for his happiness decisive—mathematical calculation. As he pondered and despaired over the certainty that his fate had taken such an unfortunate turn, Peter drank a glass of clear vodka. He had been lucky to get hold of a case of vodka from a colleague at the office, Oliver Korsholm. He had reckoned: Now that I have my own house, I need something to offer my guests!

Oliver Korsholm had come by and delivered the bottles of vodka personally, and now the case containing nine bottles of vodka were stowed under the kitchen table. The tenth bottle stood on the table before him, and Peter was about to run out of ice. In horrifying little flashes, he pictured a future without the girl from Nørregade. So certain had he been that it should be

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her—and her alone—that the contemplation of a future without her, was just as horrifying and life-threatening as being thrown out of a car travelling at high speed. Peter drank. He was not used to drinking, but he drank anyway, if only to prepare himself for the door being opened; of being flung out onto the tarmac.

“Let’s just get it over with,” he sighed, convinced that neither God nor life would grant him what he longed for.

Just as he was sitting and drinking his vodka, the front door opened, and the cleaning woman, who had come with the house, stepped into the room.

Peter had just lit a cigarette, and through the haze of smoke he did not see his cleaning woman, but a lovely young lady, who he may have been too quick to dismiss. Now he invited this young lady to take a seat. He lit a cigarette for her, poured a glass of lukewarm vodka for her, then he asked that question that lovers always pose.

He sniffed: “Who are you really, my dear? Yes, I know very well whose daughter you are, I even know your mother, I know where you live, but who are you?”

Peter turned his full attention to this young woman, who was a little overwhelmed, but flattered.

She smiled.

“What do you mean, Sir?” Her smile revealed utterly charming laugh-lines around her mouth.

Peter cleared his throat, uttered a few indefinable grunts, and then moved a little closer to the young woman.

He said: “Do you have a suitor, my dear?”

This she did not wish to answer.

However, as time passed by, the combination of vodka and continuous, persistent attention worked its ways, and the young girl asked Peter if he would like to dance, and so they danced, without music. He kissed her on the throat,

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and she let her head fall back, she let his hands glide up under her dress, and although she ought to, really ought to resist, she could not, she was too curios. She pulled him over to the table and let a hand rest on his hairy neck, pulled him down on top of her, let her dress slide off her shoulders, let her breasts lie bare, then she helped him out of his clothes, and lifted herself onto her elbows to kiss him. It felt sort of ... right, warm and sweet, completely meaningful, until all at once it was over, until he suddenly stood up, and gasped for breath, as if he had started from a dream. With a crash, an ugly scraping sound, his body hit the tarmac. She could see it in his face, that something she felt as real, warm, and special, was wholly insignificant for him, and in a flood of anger she knew she was not to come to the house again. What she did not understand, however, were the consequences. Deep inside her, an egg was on its way up through an ovary. In her womb that egg would be met by a storm of sperm cells, and these sperm cells would fertilize that egg, and change her life forever.

***************

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Extract

BROTHER & SISTER by ©Katrine Marie Guldager and Politikens Forlag, 2015 © Sample Translation, Lindy Falk van Rooyen

May 2015

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1 The story begins with a sound, with a man hearing the heavy door of the State Prison lock behind him. He looked out for a welcoming committee that wasn’t there. He drops his gaze and admits that he couldn’t expect it of them: he had been released earlier than expected, and Copenhagen was a long way away. The man, whose name is Henry, decides to go to the station, not only to save money, but because it is the first time in four years he has been at liberty to take this decision himself: I’m leaving.

Henry had looked forward to this day for a long time, but the last couple of days he had begun to worry. What if the world had changed forever? He had rung Birgitte and Lilly and Leonora to ask if they knew of anyone who could help him find a job. As he sat with the receiver in his hand, as he woke in the middle of the night, he was bathed in sweat, absolutely certain that no one would hire a man with a murder on his conscience. No one. And why should they?

Now the door has closed behind him, now he walks down the road, like a pinprick in the universe that mankind is yet to understand. He walks away, like a bit of bait on the end of a slack line, a pendulum to the sun, a rhetorical question in those roads, which flank his way: the pavement tiles are uneven, and the weeds between the slabs of concrete are not only dense, but downright stubborn. Henry breathes deeply down into his lungs. He can feel the spring, smell it emanating from the gardens of the surrounding villas like something indefinable in the air; a receptiveness. He breathes in deeply and thinks of all the animals which, just like him, will emerge from their winter lairs; hedgehogs and bats, which have very nearly consumed all their fat reserves and now must venture out and find more food. He thinks of seedlings that have spent the winter under a blanket of ice.

Then he stops short, checks that he has his parole papers and his wallet. With a stab of fear he suddenly longs for the safety of his cell, the small, definable contours of that world. He feels exposed, naked. He has no bag. The few belongings he had in prison he had given to Marl. He stops and tilts his head at the sound of a lark, and for a moment, his heart uplifts. He squints his eyes in the direction of the sound and spots the lark sitting in the garden of that villa, which he has

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stopped in front of. There is the lark in all its speckled splendour, there it sits and sings. Henry thinks how eagerly that bird now will look for a mate, build its nest and lay some eggs. He thinks about his own children, Thomas and Tine.

Thomas had been to see him a couple of times. But every time he had pulled his son close, the distance between them just seemed to grow. For even though Thomas had been happy to see him, each meeting reinforced the fact that they were gliding further and further away from each other, that the weekly phone calls didn’t make much of a difference, that the walls of the prison not only separated Henry and the world, but Henry and Thomas, father and son.

Henry arrives at the station. He goes to the Ticket Office and the man behind the hatch sends him a glance that conveys a message along the lines of: ah, yet another paroled prisoner; yet another lost soul.

The voice behind the glass said: “Yes?” And Henry replies with as much optimism as he can muster that he would like to buy a one-way ticket to Copenhagen. He fumbles the blue fifty-kroner-note into the money plate before him with sweaty palms, but deep down he is simply relieved to have been able to pay at all, that a single swivel of the plate-shaped disc delivers his change and ticket through the hatch in return, that now he can go through to the station, now he can step onto the platform.

He walks back and forth on the platform and sits down on a bench, only to get up again. He goes into a filthy toilet and drinks a little water from a chalkstained tap. He wrinkles his nose and involuntarily starts thinking of the day his sentence was passed. He thinks of the eyes of the judge and the idea that he was expected to feel guilty, for isn’t this what a sentence was meant to achieve?

Henry shudders and tries to shrug off that image, which has plagued him for four years now, an image, which has refused to go away: the picture of a society opening his skull and pouring guilt into his brain.

In the train he sits at the window opposite a woman doing a crossword puzzle.

He scratches that full beard, which he had grown in prison and stretches his legs, taking care not to touch the woman. As the train pulls out of the station he looks out of the window, gazes at the countryside passing by and wonders who he

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should contact first. He closes his eyes and pretends to sleep. A little boy comes into their compartment, taps on his knee and asks him where he’s going.

He says: “I’m going home. Where are you going?”

The boy says: “I’m going to visit my dad.”

“Are you looking forward to it?”

“No,” says the boy decisively, and leaves again.

The sun has come out; it warms Henry’s face as he leans against the window. He closes his eyes and thinks of the night he was taken into custody. That night he had realized that the darkness in prison was merely an extension of the darkness inside him. He had sworn he would be a better person, when he got out. His relationship to Birgitte was beyond repair, but he swore he would be there for her, that he would be a better father to his children, that the time in prison would give him a chance to take stock of his life, to do everything better. This is what he had thought, as they led him into State Prison, as they told him to empty his pockets and take off his clothes, as they examined his body, as they showed him into a cell, which was so small he immediately felt claustrophobic. Many times since he had noted how long and narrow the cell was – like a coffin – because it was a coffin. For prison is a place where people are buried alive.

For the better part of the first year he was able to keep up his spirits. Leonora wrote to him every Sunday, and he kept a diary. He got hold of a television, and he watched many informative documentaries about countries he had never heard of before. He also hooked up with Marl and Drum-Kalle. They became a regular trio, they exchanged fags and books – even letters from home – which they read out loud to each other in respectful silence; each and every word from the outside was a ray of light in the darkness, a lifeline. In the beginning, it was not as bad as he had feared, and he had some comfort in the thought that not Klaus or Leonora, but he, Henry, had been locked up, because prison triggered something in him that he’d always been good at: learning to survive. But then DrumKalle got depressed. Henry repeatedly told the warden that Kalle needed to see a doctor. But nothing happened. On the contrary. The warden told him on several

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occasions to mind his own business. It was pointed out that Drum-Kalle himself had neither requested nor duly applied for medical assistance; that access to a doctor could only be granted under acute circumstances, and that such circumstances were not prevailing. Was Drum-Kalle bleeding? Was he screaming? Was he banging his head against the prison walls? No? Well then, the matter could hardly be acute.

Shortly thereafter, Drum-Kalle hung himself in his cell; the same day his girlfriend married someone else. At the funeral Henry went to greet the new priest, and the priest agreed to meet with him and Marl afterwards. He said: “It’s not your fault. Kalle fought his battles with this world for a long time. But now God has taken him back home.”

But still it seemed as if something in Marl had broken, and those meetings, which had helped them keep their spirits up before, now just dragged them down.

Marl said: “I’m going back to my cell.”

And Henry went back to his, and prison life continued as before. Every day had its own, set routine; it proceeded upon the strike of the clock. Henry was woken at the stroke of the hour, emptied his piss-pot upon the next, given breakfast upon the next, performed his prison duties or had a bath upon the next. For there were many things to be said about the prison wardens, but they always stuck to the rules, and they did everything by the clock. For most of the inmates this was a comfort. But for Henry, the regularity with which every routine was performed became a source of budding madness. For was the rigidity of the routine not devoid of all humanity? Didn’t all the little mishaps, the tiny delays, reveal the humanity of the wardens? Didn’t error evidence that the prison had a heart after all? Were those punctual repetitions not the ultimate proof of the fact that the prison was a mill grinding people to death?

By and by, as Henry lost contact with Marl, he lost a sense of his environment, a sense of time itself. He could no longer tell, whether two days or two weeks had passed, since the last knock on his door. Those had been the darkest of his days, the most destructive. He tried to read, he tried to write, but ever so slowly the

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one thing, which formed the human brain, namely memory, disintegrated more and more. It seemed as if the fat of memory was shrinking, disappearing; people dropped out of his memory, and those things, which he had fixed upon before, simply merged into a grey morass of nothingness, even the letters of the alphabet danced before his eyes like dried up insects.

Henry opens his eyes when the train pulls into the station at Nyborg harbour. As soon as the Great Belt ferry has docked at the quay, the train will roll onboard.

Henry sends the woman opposite a smile and she fishes a pack of Prince out of her bag.

“Would you like a smoke?”

Henry shakes his head.

He looks at the woman, but he does not see her. He is thinking about the money.

About the 50.000 kroner he got from Ella, about the safety deposit box at Copenhagen Main Station. He is nervous. For this is the decisive moment; now it will be revealed, whether his life will be starting over. He is balancing: on the edge of light. It is as if the world hasn’t decided whether it will take him back. ***********

11.

One warm, spring day Lilly went to the Larsbjørnsstræde Quarter to browse; it would prove to be an afternoon that would change her life. In a little sous-terrain shop not far from Roger’s Second Hand Store she met a half-Indian, as she liked to call him, although nothing about him was done in halves. Black Hawk was a handsome, young Cheyenne, who had come directly from California. He had typically Indian characteristics about his appearance, but his clothing was both typically Indian and not. He had a brow band of feathers on his head, a colourful chain of beads around his neck and his hair lay in plaits over the thunderbird printed on the back of his denim waistcoat. But he also wore a T-shirt with the words ‘coca-cola’ printed on his chest, a pair of jeans and a digital watch. Black Hawk sat in the shop on an old, brown couch, and Lilly cut a figure against the sun as she came down the stairs into the shop in her green leather sandals with a

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moderately high heel (bought at Daells Warehouse on a sale).

Black Hawk asked: “How can I help you?”

And Lilly, who was quite taken with him before he had even opened his mouth, smiled and answered in a tone that was bordering on arrogance: “I don’t know!”

She was overcome by a desire to go over and sit down next to him on the couch, but she waited. She had stood on the stairs in the light like a deer in the clearing of a forest, certain that something wonderful – perhaps catastrophic – was going to happen; was just about to happen. She had stood in the clear light waiting for a sign. For she did not take it for given that she had a right to approach this strange, red-brown body, which manifested a reality and a truth she did not understand yet instinctively was drawn to, for many things could be said about Lilly: that she was self-involved person, a bad mother and an awful artist, but it was also true that she had abundant powers of creative energy, that she was always open to new things and she never hid herself behind her age – as some people already did in their thirties. And she had a way of listening to her children and her grandchildren as if they were explorers who brought new insight and understanding of the miracle of this world to us each and every day. And so she stood before this Indian, this Black Hawk, this young man, who presently patted the seat beside him and said he was the son of a famous medicine man, and that, very soon, he would be taking his first trip to the Underworld.

“Really?”

Lilly had sat down in the couch like a real lady: shoulders back, knees pressed together diagonally to the one side. She offered to show Black Hawk around the city of Copenhagen, and Black Hawk, after yelling something to someone in the back room, accepted her offer with pleasure. Lilly was surprised to see he was wearing moccasins, but not as surprised as she was, when Black Hawk said that in order to travel to the Underworld, he had to cast his soul into a hole in the ground: a cave, a fountain or a fox-hole. Lilly had looked at his hair in the sunlight, behind him, she saw two cars crashing into one another, and she said yes, of course she would like to help him. They bought a joint from a scruffy

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drummer wearing a cowboy hat, and then they carried on down Nørre Voldgade to Ørsteds Park, where Lilly thought they might be able to find the kind of hole in the ground Black Hawk was looking for – beside an old tree, perhaps.

As they were walking down the street, Black Hawk suddenly stopped and sat down on a doorstep. He said: “What did you say your name was ... Lilly? I feel something.”

As Lilly bent down she could see the whites of his eyes showing. She started in fear, throwing a glance over her shoulder as if a crime had been committed.

“Yes, Lil-ly,” she said nervously. “Are you already in the Underworld?”

“Not yet,” he said, but he realized he probably already was on his way there.

Lilly sat down next to Black Hawk on the doorstep. She closed her eyes and put her arms around him. To a bystander, she may well have looked like a white, deranged mother holding her sleeping, Indian child, but in truth, they were already travelling to the cool, dark deep of the Underworld together; already they were below that sun, which illuminates the consciousness of mankind, that sun, which shines through the leafage of the magical world; a sun, which tribes all over the world have ascribed equal value as that sun, which shines upon a green cornfield. Black Hawk took Lilly’s hand in his, and they walked into the unknown together. Her green sandals were impractical, so they stopped for a moment and she took them off and put them at the foot of a rocky outcrop.

They realized that they had arrived before a cave. They could see light coming from a place deeper down the cave. Then Black Hawk was contacted by those spirits, which had called to him. They formed a circle around him, embraced him.

Lilly was both there and she wasn’t; the spirits had not included her in their midst Feeling forlorn, Lilly kneeled down next to her green sandals. Looking at Black Hawk and the circle of spirits, she was certain that what she saw before her eyes, was pure magic.

“What is your animal totem, your spirit animal?” a voice asked in broken English.

She did not know what to say. Her animal totem? Her spirit animal? Lilly may be brave and open to new truths revealed by this ancient world, but this was all starting to sound a little too mystical for her liking. She got up and, walking towards the light, she soon found herself standing at the mouth of the cave.

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She looked out over an exquisite plain; it seemed as if all forms of life were in harmony, as if plants, animals, yes – the earth itself – was communicating. As she stood standing there, she was addressed by the voice once more. The voice told her about the she-wolf, indeed, perhaps it was the she-wolf.

The voice explained that the she-wolf collected the joints and bones of all the dead animals in the desert, especially the bones of dead wolves. She took the bones back to her cave, and when she had enough bones for an entire wolf, she started to sing.

As the animal began to take form again, as it grew fur and eyes once more, the shewolf sang; she sang till the desert floor trembled, she sang, as the wolf sprang free from her fantasy, ran down into a ravine and out into the desert. And one day, said the voice, the wolf would be ready to take on a new form. One day, as it ran through a river, or the first rays of sun shone on its fur, it would become a woman.

“If you are lucky,” said the voice, “you will meet this woman one day. And if she likes you, she will show you a part of her soul.”

Then the voice was gone just as swiftly as it had come, and Lilly sat down and looked out over the plain. It felt as if she had been sitting – right there – all her life; it felt as if she would never leave. Yet now she had a better understanding of the question the voice had posed. Now she understood that perhaps there had been a reason why the wolf had always pursued her. Did it have a particular plan for her? That is, other than scaring the wits out of her?

She walked back to where Black Hawk was sitting, and said: “Does the wolf want to help me?”

Her voice was trembling.

She remembered the wolf snapping at her throat that time she still lived in Ib Berthelsen’s flat on Bredgade.

Black Hawk stepped out of the circle of spirits, and said to Lilly: “Our spirit animal is the bearer of our greatest secrets, our greatest powers. Often our spirit animal shows itself in our childhood, and the first time we see it, can be very frightening. We could wake in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, when we see our spirit animal in our dreams. In a nightmare. Our spirit animal represents the emotions we haven’t learnt to control yet. For instance, most people like to think of themselves as good. But the spirit animal also represents those powers

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within us, which are evil. Our spirit animal represents our aggression. A wolf, you say? Let me guess. Have you ever turned into a wolf?

Lilly cast her eyes down.

It unnerved her that a strange man should know her better, than she knew herself.

For yes, many times, she had been on the point of changing into a wolf; she still looked back on those memories in horror.

Black Hawk said: “The wolf is a very strong animal. A survivor. But the wolf is also a greedy animal. One day you will understand that you don’t need to kill others in order to survive yourself.”

Even before the sun went down, they were back on Larsbjørnsstræde. Black Hawk, who was not in possession of anything as practical and worldly as money, pulled out a chair for Lilly, when they passed a restaurant with a few tables and chairs on the sidewalk. Again she was reminded of that strange combination of something very old, yet very boyish. He leaned over the table and took Lilly’s hand in his: “You will always have a special place in my heart,” he said. “You see, I have always known I would be a medicine man. But what is a medicine man? A medicine man is a tool for the spirits. A medicine man must wait, till he is called. And today I was called!”

A waiter came out and poured them each a glass of red wine, and Black Hawk, thinking it was something else, drank greedily.

He coughed, spilling wine stains onto his white T-shirt.

When he had recovered a little, he explained that the spirits had tried to help him to understand her. The spirits had explained that people in the Western world often were unhappy, because they were unable to access their own healing powers; they had lost a piece of their souls.

Black Hawk said earnestly: “We know this from foxes or wolves in nature, not so? If they get caught in a trap in the woods, they would rather gnaw off their own leg, than stay trapped; at some point in their journeys, they had to gnaw off a part of themselves. In order

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to survive. Or be loved.”

Lilly thought about the time she lived on Nørregade in Køge.

“If the teachers we’ve had in our lives, our parents, for example, have accepted, who we are, our souls would probably have remained intact. But if those teachers have tried to form us according to their own ideas, part of our souls may have been lost. Do you understand? The soul loses a part of its power.”

The food arrived and Lilly nodded anxiously. She had never thought of seeing her father, Karl, in this light. She picked up her knife and fork, carefully bit on a piece of the patty she had been served, pushing the soft onions up onto the side of her plate.

Black Hawk looked down at his own minced meat patty with mixed feelings.

He asked: “Did you remember your sandals?”

Only now Lilly realized that her feet were bare.

“If we aren’t allowed to be ourselves, we will suffer in silence. We throw oil on our own fires,” said Black Hawk, biting into his patty.

Lilly shuddered. How could he be saying all this? How could he know her so well? Can a lifetime of suffering really be understood in the space of an afternoon? For this was exactly how she had felt on her wedding night. This was exactly the image, which had been so clearly cut upon her inner eye: that the fire of her soul was dying out. That she could use a whole lifetime collecting wood without there ever being enough. All at once she remembered the day her mother was buried. She remembered putting a photograph of herself in her mother’s coffin so she wouldn’t be alone. Now she understood that her action had been more symbolic: that part of her own soul had journeyed on with her mother. ***********

19.

When October arrived, a change came over Køge. The light started to fade, the wind bit into your cheeks, folk came down with a cold; they were too slow in digging out those knitted sweaters. The birds, which had been singing age-old

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songs, now suddenly fell silent, as if, all at once, they became aware of time and themselves. And then the rains came. Now and again, it seemed as if the landscape around Køge condensed; as if the landscape itself were weeping, sending small rivers of tears down into town.

Henry had explained that on their way up to Hellerup Station, they had come by a large garden, that a dog had attacked them out of the blue. Naturally, he had already reported the incident to the police, and naturally one ought to institute legal proceedings against such blatantly negligent people, who let vicious dogs out on the loose. But it wasn’t his fault. He had held out his savaged arms and hands to Leonora.

He said: “I defended her as best I could, Leonora. Look at me: I fought with that dog.”

Leonora asked him to leave, and Klaus said she was being too hard on him. They had been sitting in a lounge that was crammed with half-finished paintings, there were dolls and toys strewn everywhere. Karl said Henry must feel just as bad as she did, but Leonora said she never, never, never should have left her daughter in Henry’s care. And she looked down at Maria, who just cried and cried, for she could see from the look on their faces that something was wrong.

October became November, and it rained and rained, it rained so much that the priest on the square began to wonder, whether the rain could have an explanation over and above natural causes, it must be a sign of something or other – perhaps it was Our Lord Himself, who was about to unleash a flood of biblical proportions? The priest thought: have my parishioners really sinned so much that the history of Køge is to be rewritten from scratch? He was not at all sceptical about the idea of another Flood in Køge; folk still talked about the storm flood of 1872.

And the priest on the square in Køge was such an avid reader of the Bible, that the biblical universe was threaded into his consciousness just as much as that of the town of Køge. And, as such, the idea of another universal Flood having its source in Køge, wasn’t fantastical to him. And so he walked the streets of Køge: in a pair of green galoshes. He watched the rain drip, run and flow from turrets and towers, he heard it wash, gush and gurgle over gridirons and collect in small rivers in the gutters. He watched the rain glide down the shop windows, slide off

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drainpipes and cornices, he felt the rain seeping into his eyes and penetrating his clothes. He felt little drops slithering down his arms, down over his stomach, and he wished it would never stop. Also the author of this book wished the rain would never end, for also she pinned a measure of hope upon the rain, also she wished the rain could wash away Leonora’s thoughts; that it could cleanse those wounds, which have arisen in this novel. But that would be expecting too much from the autumn rains, and its eternal dripping and gushing and flowing could seem both cold and cruel. Cruel because it has no single purpose, it just rains and drowns everything within its reach; cold, because it reminds you of the dark, oxygen-poor waters of the deep, or rivers with fish floating belly-up on the surface.

But by and by, the rain became a house, a deep room taking shape around Køge, around Leonora, who lay in the midst of the rain, feeling forlorn. For in the midst of the rain a fire was burning. Leonora remembered standing in the garden, when she was nine-years-old; she had just set fire to her home in an attempt to kill her brother. She thought: if only I had succeeded! The world would have been a better place without Henry. At night, she woke bathed in sweat, she sat by Maria’s cot and sang in a voice that rang shrill. The melody was like a banister she clung to, but couldn’t grasp; her palms were sweaty, slippery. The child slept with her barely visible scars in the semi-darkness; the child slept and did not hear her mother’s voice fading to a mumble down the staircase. For this was exactly what she had feared most since the day Maria was born. Since the day of Maria’s birth, she had been terrified of hurting the child, and now she had let someone else hurt her. Why had she trusted Henry? Had he not shown – more than a thousand times – that he was not to be trusted? How could she have allowed him anywhere near Maria?

Klaus persistently played the matter down.

“How could we have known this would happen?”

He said: “It could’ve happened to both you and me!”

But Leonora refused to believe him.

When she was not sitting by Maria’s bed, she lay in her own bed and dreamt of her revenge. She dreamt of contacting Henry’s superior in the electro-firm he worked

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for and stating that it was only a matter of time, before Henry dipped his fingers into the cashier. She dreamt of meeting up with Sally and telling her that Henry was – and always had been – a burden on the family. Oh how she relished this picture: that she would take everything away from him. She dreamt of jerking him back to the time and place of his release from prison. Also his relationship with Birgitte would be destroyed; she would make sure he would never see his children again. No, Lilly would certainly never disown him. But she, she would never speak to him ever again, never again would she attend family gatherings he was invited to. She would take destiny’s scissors and cut him out of the picture.

She shuddered, just thinking about it.

All at once, it was morning. The light poured into the window and banished the evening’s thoughts from her head. She lay like this on the bed: bathed in light.

It was no longer raining and Maria needed breakfast, attention, love; Klaus got up and very much wanted to have his breakfast, attention, love. This is how they were: like small chicks demanding to have a little food stuck into their open beaks, and on those mornings, when she managed to feed them both and make the pack-lunches, on those mornings, all thoughts of revenge were a long way away; so utterly unimportant. And this much she knew about revenge: it hits back. The harder she hit Henry, the more likely it was she would hit herself.

When the rain eventually stopped, two things happened: Leonora became pregnant, and she started to paint. Without being able to explain why, one morning, she became aware of how her room became illuminated from various different angles at once. Before she knew it, several dark, indefinable shadows had manifested themselves on her canvas. As yet, she could not identify the shape of her new series of motifs. As yet, she did not know she was painting that wolf, which had followed Lilly all those years ago. As yet, she did not find it frightening at all. On the contrary, she rested a hand on her belly and thought about the new life growing inside her. She relished the thought that she still had many months to paint.

Very soon after, Leonora and Klaus were invited to two parties: Leonora’s father-in-law turned 60, and Lilly turned 59. Lilly was to celebrate her birthday with a luncheon at Langelinie Pavilion, a celebration, which was announced to

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her guests on an open postcard. Kurt’s birthday would be celebrated in more humble circumstances; the food was home-made, the folding tables at the local branch of Metals were laid with paper table-cloths and paper plates. But Kurt’s party had everything, which a real party inevitably had: there was plenty to drink for the guests; there were tears, when Karen manifested the aggregate of fears in this world by reading out loud a love poem by Grundtvig; there was a scuffle outside, when one brother-in-law sat too close to another brother-in-law’s wife; at three o’clock in the morning, only the eldest guests had left, everyone was dancing, and Leonora, who had sworn to herself that she would only drink a beer or two, was not only tipsy and smoking red Cecils, but had told anyone, who cared to listen, that she was pregnant – despite the fact that she had sworn not to say anything until she was gone three months, despite the fact that this was the last thing she had said to Klaus before stepping out the door.

But at the party she hugged her mother-in-law, saying she had good news, and Karen had smiled knowingly, and said: “Does this mean you’ll be moving to Marievej?”

“Marievej?”

It was like an explosion in her heart, at once surprising, yet utterly self-evident.

Of course now was the time to move back to Marievej! Now was the time they needed the extra space! She counted on her fingers. It was almost three months to go before the tenants would move out. And their savings. Surely there would soon be enough money in the pot to buy Henry out?

The next morning the move to Marievej didn’t seem nearly as self-evident. Not only was Leonora nauseous, she was exhausted by the thought of the coming pregnancy, by the prospect of having to breast-feed, all those sleepless nights.

Not to mention that ever-present fear that something would happen to the child: that it would suffer from some unidentifiable illness, fall down the stairs; die.

She turned to face the snoring Klaus and wondered what time they could fetch Maria, who was being looked after by Maren Katrine.

She snuck out of bed and stood looking at the dark shadows drawn on her canvas on the easel, which, contrary to all custom, was not stood in its place by the rear staircase. She thought how wonderful it had been to dance again. And felt a rush of

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nausea. Oh, how Klaus’ family got on her nerves. Yes, they were kind and sweet, and they treated her with respect. But their lives were so small. At one stage of the festivities, she had sat quite still and listened to the conversations going on round the table. One man explained earnestly what it would cost to buy a colourTV in instalments; a little further down, another man declared with pride that he’d bought a moped for his son; Karen’s gift to Kurt had been a Spies travel-package to Mallorca. Folk had clapped and yelled: “Par-ty time! Par-ty time!”

Klaus was getting up, making noises in the bedroom.

Since coming home from Femø, she had taken a different view of Klaus’ family. She had not noticed before that they always split into two groups: one for the men and one for the women. Never before had she noticed that it was the women, who cleared- and washed up, served and made the food. Never before had she noticed that the men continued their conversation, whilst the women served them.

Leonora put on a pair of socks and stole down into the kitchen. She made a fried egg, drank a cup of tea and decided to go fetch Maria at Maren Katrine’s.

It was Sunday and the town was deserted.

Leonora unlocked her bicycle, thinking about her free existence, that she wouldn’t exchange it for the world. As she passed a bakery on the square, she unwittingly passed by Sally, who had been lying awake all night, waiting for Henry. She had not seen him since the downpour of rain was at its worst, and she was beginning to worry. Where could he be? Leonora cycled out towards Strøby Egede, and without knowing it, she passed that beach, where Henry was lying half-unconscious. Leonora cycled by, as Henry lay with his cheek buried in the gravel. As the rain poured down, Henry had fled out of town, only stopping to buy a six-pack of Gold beers at a kiosk. He had sat on the beach and wondered how he would ever be able to salvage his relationship to Leonora – and Sally – who hadn’t said anything, yet expected it of him: to move on.

The Gold beers, which usually made him feel superior, convinced that the problems in this world were only there to be solved, now just made him feel tired.

At first he had felt the drops of water, but as the beers took effect, he no longer noticed the rain. It dripped from his hair, from his eyebrows, from his beard, but

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he felt nothing. Nor did he notice the cold come a-creeping on, for what was the cold other than the norm? What had life ever offered him, except cold and rain?

And as the maudlin Henry sat and drank his beers, he overlooked the range of opportunities which life had offered him.

When the pack of Gold beers were finished, he was terribly thirsty, and as the needle of his inner compass had spun round so many times that he no longer knew North from South, East from West, up from down, right from wrong, or good from bad, he decided to quench his thirst with the ocean. He crawled down to the shore on all fours. He let his melancholy, confused head sink down between his shoulder blades, he dipped a rough, foul-smelling tongue into the crest of the saltwater; his eyes closed in respectful awe. And then he fell. This is how his liberation felt, the relief of simply giving up. Indeed it seemed to him that right there, somewhere between Køge and Strøby Egede, he’d made peace with all his woes, with everything he’d longed for. The rush of the waves became the sound of a woman tenderly stroking his hair, whispering loving kisses in his ear; it was like sinking into the embrace of his loved one, being enveloped. It was as if finally someone was there to receive him, even if that someone was Death.

Finally, finally it came: that ship, which he’d been waiting for since he was no more than a big lad, that ship, which would carry him out and into the world and give him that satisfaction, which he craved, that ship, which would him carry far away from Køge and those succession of failures, which his life had consisted of till now. He sailed away with the ship, which was light as a feather, and he was happy, elated. He felt the wind on his face, inhaled the smell of the sea and the salt water; he closed his eyes, and the ship flew.

***************

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Contact Nya Guldberg Head of Foreign Rights +45 33 47 07 93 nya.guldberg@jppol.dk Rudi Urban Rasmussen Literary Agent +45 33 47 07 82 rudi.u.rasmussen@jppol.dk Helle Skov Wacher International PR Co-ordinator +45 33 47 07 51 helle.s.wacher@jppol.dk Mia Dall Assistant +45 33 47 07 82 mia.dall@jppol.dk

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