I Curse the River of Time (17 page)

Past the loading ramp, through the plastic double-doors, cold outside, warm inside, the forklift trucks parked along the wall. The concourse was quiet and there was a freshness to the air you did not normally feel in here between the machines, no dull blows against your earmuffs, no whirls of dust in your eyes, no heat, no smell of burnt plastic from the melting chamber, no hum from the assembly lines, or itching or sticky sweat. The old-timers in their blue work clothes hung around the coffee machine, small-talking about things of no consequence, and Elly, sleepy Elly so remote in her pale blue apron, standing there, or sometimes sitting, five pallets up dangling her legs. No one was called Elly any more, except Elly. She had nice legs. She was ten years older
than me, perhaps more, and I guess it showed, but it was hard not to look at her. She smiled to me above the shoulders of the old men, and she winked, and I winked back and walked the stairs down to the basement and the locker rooms where at last I had been given one, after someone had left. Having your own locker was important. You could hold your head high.

Two hours into the shift the foreman came over. The air was thick with dust, every machine was rolling, the small one and the two big ones and I was standing at one of them and time after time I had to run to the forklift truck to bring forward new pallets with seven stacks of paper so the belt would not stop. The A team was doing well even though two of us were off work that day. I removed my earmuffs, bent down and turned my naked ear to the foreman’s mouth and he told me I had to go and see the personnel director. Now. He looked at me and left. I looked down the belt, along the platform we were standing on, feeding our stations, Elly and Reidun and Reidar and I, and I waved to Hassan who was running the machine and pointed to my chest and then to the door leading through to the office block. I filled my stations elegantly with thirty-two pages of folded, hard fibre, porous paper manufactured in Norway by Follum Factories. Hassan came over. He showed me five stiff fingers on his right hand and counted them one after the other with the index finger of his left hand, right in front of my face to make sure I got everything right. I nodded, and he smiled, and as everything was running
smoothly, he took over my station. Hassan was all right. I stepped down from the platform and walked through the concourse and out through the soundproof door to the part of the business that had carpets on the floors and potted plants by the lift.

Four floors up. It just said
Tommy
on the door, suggesting he was one of the boys, was one of us all in every department and to give the door an intimacy I was not sure I liked. I did not like it. I knocked on the door and entered.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Just a moment.’

I stood there waiting for several minutes. Was he trying to psych me out, I wondered, make me look like an idiot, make me feel less than I was? I grew uncertain. Not scared, but uncertain. Perhaps he knew something I did not, something that could harm me? If that was the point he was doing a good job, but he didn’t know that. I smiled vaguely the whole time, and then he raised his head and said:

‘Do you know why we gave you a job here?’

‘Because I applied, I suppose.’

‘Because your father called to ask if we would. Give you a job.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘We liked your father here. He gave his all, every single shift, he was never ill, never caused any trouble. It was not his fault that the shifts and the overtime became too much for him. He’s not a young man any more.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘That was the only reason.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘Yes, that was all.’

I turned and headed for the door, and when I got there and had my hand on the door handle, I stopped and said:

‘Do you know who the
peuple
is?’

‘I don’t give a shit.’

‘I thought so,’ I said with something that was meant to be a sarcastic smile, but it was clear that he did not give a damn about the
peuple
, nor why I asked the question, and anyway he was already looking at his papers again and did not see my smile. And I thought, am I a man who could step forward and kick the personnel director called Tommy so hard on the shin he would be forced to give me the sack, and yet leave the factory with my head held high? But I knew that I was not, and on my way down in the lift from the fourth floor I was gasping for air.

20

I
did not understand. It felt so long since I walked down the gangplank of the
Holger Danske
and into this town, and it was early morning. This day. It should have been over by now. It was November, it was evening, it should have been dark, but the sun was still hanging low above the rooftops to the west, where it glowed faintly and refused to let go.

I cycled past the Palads Theatre in the far north of the town. In front of the old cinema there were long shadows falling in razor sharp lines across the houses on the opposite side, but they were not long enough, not dark enough to soften this angular, insistent light.

At a kiosk that was still open, there were newspapers stacked on a stand outside, and in large bold typeface on every front page it said THE WALL TUMBLES, and I could not breathe, where had I been? This was bad, I had not paid attention, it was really bad, and I started to cry. I felt my tears flow right through town from Gammeltorv, and they flowed across the junction with the Løve Pharmacy and then down across the square by the Svane Pharmacy. Time had passed behind my back and I had not turned to look, that was really, really bad, and I cycled on with tears flowing down my face along Søndergade all the way to the south of town, to a place where I used to drink beer in the olden days. It was almost as far as Møllehuset
and the mill brook and the ice cream stall that was closed now, like everything else was closed, and all the way out to the Bangsbo Manor park with its two golden tigers which everyone thought were lions resting on plinths to either side of the entrance. The manor was a museum now and had been for many years. I had gone there several times with the girls. It was a good museum. We entered the big, horseshoe-shaped main building to look at the exhibits from places around the town and from the coast and inland, and there was furniture a hundred years old or even more, and clothes with lace and wide shirt fronts, and work clothes and vast numbers of photographs in off white and sepia on the walls. On the way out we bought lollies from the counter and stood on the white painted bridge across the moat and fed stale bread to the ducks from a bag we had brought with us. We broke the bread into suitable chunks and threw them into the water one by one, and the ducks came swimming at full speed from all directions in a splash of foam, flapping to get there ahead of each other in a whirling chaos, and sometimes the carp would come darting, straight out of nowhere, their backs red, and would get there first and drag the pieces of bread down into the tea-coloured water and disappear towards the bottom.

I made a turn towards the manor park and wiped my face, that was cold now in the cold wind and clammy against my palms, but the tears were no longer running from my eyes and I thought of all the photographs from Berlin I had seen, and especially the one with the soldier in his shiny helmet
and spotless uniform floating across the no man’s land between East and West, his gun on his back, muzzle down, stock up, hanging there suspended in the air with the coiled barbed wire beneath him for almost thirty years, and wondered if he finally was allowed to land now.

With the bicycle between my legs I stood for a while gazing past the towering ash and chestnut trees and beeches towards the large, white house at the far end of the park; the white bridge, everything bare now, unflowering, pure and clean. Only one man was wandering along the footpaths with burlap sacks under his arm covering the pruned flowers that would die when the frost came. If it came.

Then I turned the bicycle around and went back a bit the same way I had come, up Søndergade to the place where I used to drink when the wall was still standing, but when I got there, I could not find it. I pushed the bicycle along the building. There was the usual second-hand furniture, clothes and the unloved books for sale in the Santal Mission charity shop, and to the right of its large windows was the door I could have sworn led to the bar where I had planned to have a beer. But there was not even a sign with
CLOSED
hung up behind the glass or
Moved to this
or
that
address. The café was simply gone. Above the window it said
FONA
in hard blue neon lights. I shielded my eyes with both hands and leaned towards the window and peered through the glass, and inside there were rows of television sets and stereos for sale.

‘Goddamnit,’ I said out loud, and suddenly the urge for
a beer was stronger than usual. There was a fissure in my life, a void, and that void, only beer could fill.

A man passed me on the pavement. He had probably heard me swearing and walked on in a strange and cautious way to a door a bit further down in the next house. Almost always there were white pots with red geraniums on a windowsill if it was an apartment. And sure enough, there they were, the geraniums, and the man pulled a key out of his pocket, but then he turned and looked my way, and walked back when he realised why I was standing there and could see from my blue bicycle that I was not Danish, for all Danish bicycles are black.

‘You haven’t been here for a while,’ he said in a kind of Swedish. ‘They closed two years ago,’ and I thought why the hell is it that all Danes think that all Norwegians are Swedes and at the same time speak such dreadful Swedish? We are three countries in Scandinavia, for Christ’s sake.

‘They’ve moved,’ he said and pointed back into town. ‘They’re next to Rose’s Bookshop.’ As though everyone knew where Rose’s Bookshop was. But
I
knew where Rose’s Bookshop was. I had cycled there from the summer house through town when I was a youngster, and younger even, and had stood outside to gaze at the new books in the window and leafed through the remainder boxes on the pavement outside the shop and always found something I wanted, that I could afford.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll go back to the bar next door to Rose’s Bookshop and get drunk.’

‘You’re not Swedish,’ he said. ‘You’re Norwegian.’

‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Really, not bad at all. Then perhaps not so very drunk,’ I said.

‘I hope not,’ he said.

‘Again, thank you very much,’ I said, and got on my bicycle.

‘Good luck,’ he said.

First, I stopped outside the bookshop. It was late in the day, there was a grille outside the door, but the obstinate light still stayed in the sky, and the lamps in the ceiling above the window display were lit. Klaus Rifbjerg had a new book out. He had almost every year. And there was a collected edition of la cour’s poems. And a paperback edition of
Hærværk (Ravaged)
by Tom Kristensen, about the alcoholic journalist and critic, Ole Jastrau. That book terrified me so the first time I read it that I promised myself and the god who did not exist that I would never ever touch alcohol. Then I parked my bike in a cycle stand and entered the bar.

Inside it was brown and gloomy. The first thing I saw through the haze of tobacco smoke was the illuminated bar and the men with their elbows on the counter between all kinds of bottles, and little by little more men and a few women emerged in the booths to the right and the left of me. They were all drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, Prince, I supposed, and they spoke about things they knew something about, but that were alien to me, and in here they could keep each other informed by exchanging views on the most recent progress in any topic worth talking about, like the need for icebreakers in a time like ours when
the ice no longer lay that solid, about shipbuilding, the size of the gas tankers owned by the Alpha Diesel company, and most certainly they talked about the Wall which, to my total surprise, had fallen, hurling chunks of concrete to East and West, and every sound from every corner of the room was deafening, almost menacing after the silence of the street. But when I came down the steps the room went quiet. Everyone turned and looked at me. I walked quietly up to the bar, the last few paces maybe less confident than the first, and found the only available space between the men standing there. They all had one elbow resting on the counter, and were all facing me.

I ordered a beer and said:

‘Draught beer, please, if you have any.’ I could see nothing but bottles scattered along the counter, bottles of Carlsberg and Tuborg, but I did not feel like bottled beer. It was too lukewarm and there was not enough of it.

Draught beer was no problem. The barman took a glass, pulled the handle and filled it and there was too much foam so he scraped the foam off the glass with a wooden spatula and filled the glass to the brim a second time and placed it in front of me on a beer mat, which said Carlsberg in green and white letters with a red crown in the middle.

The men started talking again, and the few women too. At first just barely audible, and then louder and louder until they were almost back at the volume they had when I entered the room, but not quite, and perhaps a little more guarded, a little more private, as if I were an informer for the shipyard, where I guessed most of them worked.

I took a deep swig of my beer, and it really did taste
good, so I took another and put the glass back on its Carlsberg beer mat and gave a sigh, that could be heard by many, and rolled a cigarette with tobacco from my Petterøe 3 tobacco pouch, and lit it with the blue lighter. The man that was second closest to me along the counter leaned across the man beside me and looked at my tobacco pouch and said:

‘So you’re Norwegian.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s right.’ And I thought, what is it about this day that I keep bumping into Danes who have such a profound insight into the field of Scandinavian languages?

‘Pardon me for asking, but, eh, in that case what are you doing here?’