Salinger's Letters (3 page)

‘No.'

‘I am someone you
have
to meet, someone you invented yourself.'

‘A beast? A troll? Some creature I tried to slay?'

‘No, you can never kill me.'

‘Why not?'

There was the sound of laughter. ‘Because if you kill me, you also kill yourself.'

‘Is this some kind of guessing game?'

‘I'm your own invention.'

‘When did I invent you?'

‘Just now.'

‘Are you a man or a woman?'

‘Can't you tell?'

‘How old are you?'

‘How old are
you
?'

‘Are you my age?'

‘Born the same year, the same month, the same week, the same time, the same place.'

‘And I invented you myself?'

‘You're inventing me as we speak, Dan Moller, student of dentistry.'

‘Have you been following me?'

‘Always, every day, all your life.'

There was a peal of thunder and a flash of lightning lit up the woods. Standing in a group of trees I saw a figure. It was a woman, a woman I didn't know, whom I had never seen before.

Lightning struck again twice and I got a good look at her.

She was slender with short hair and her eyes were hostile. She was dressed completely in black.

Another bolt of lightning lit up the woods.

She sneered, ‘Bit melodramatic, don't you think, all that thunder and lightning?'

‘Did you order it? Is it you that's being melodramatic?'

‘Dear little Dan, you still don't seem to understand.'

‘What don't I understand? That you're a monster in a fairy tale like all the others and I have to kill you now?'

‘Do you want to commit suicide?'

‘I don't want to, but I've thought about it a lot.'

She walked over to me and handed me a sword that she had been hiding behind her back. I took it. ‘Where did you get that sword?' I asked.

‘You gave it to me yourself. Now decide if you want to cut off my head or stab me in the heart.'

‘Who are you?' I asked

‘I'm Amanda.'

‘Amanda?'

‘Yes, that's the name you've given me.'

‘When?'

‘Now.'

‘Amanda who?'

‘Just Amanda.'

‘What does Amanda mean?'

‘It means ‘She who shall be loved'.'

‘Should I love you?'

‘It's up to you. You created me.'

‘Why should I love someone I don't know?'

‘You know me. You know me as well as you know yourself.'

‘How well do I know myself?'

She laughed. ‘Only on a very superficial level. Like a stranger passing in the street.'

I felt I was being weighed down by a burden so heavy that I was brought to my knees on the forest floor.

Amanda quickly took two steps backwards.

‘Stop being so pathetic, Dan. Kneeling down before me? That's really not my style.'

‘You were the one that made me kneel,' I protested.

The pressure increased, forcing me down even further. I heard myself uttering words I hadn't actually thought of. ‘Hey! I know who you are. You're Depression. You're my Depression.'

‘With a capital D, I believe?'

‘You're the depression in one of Ulla Ladegaard's fairy tales.'

‘No, I'm the depression in one of Dan Thorvald Moller's fairy tales.'

‘Welcome,' I said.

‘Thank you.'

‘What can you tell me about myself?'

‘Only what you invent yourself, Dan.'

‘Are you related to Ulla Ladegaard?'

‘Ulla is dead, Dan.'

‘Of course she's not dead. She took me into the woods to find you.'

I heard the sound of footsteps running over the twigs on the forest floor. Amanda was gone.

Amanda's disappearance coincided with my coming out of the acid trip. I was back in the apartment on Strandboulevarden in Osterbro.

My sense of time seemed to be out of whack. It felt like the trip had lasted for months. How long it had really lasted I didn't know.

On the way down the stairs Schroder wanted to know if the LSD had had any effect on my depression. I told him about Amanda.

It was dark and windy outside when we reached the street. I walked him to his bus stop on Claessensgade.

Four days later I read in the paper that Ulla was dead.

Four months later Schroder committed suicide by checking into a hotel on Vendersgade and emptying two bottles of pills. He left letters to his family, friends and colleagues. To my surprise he had also written me a letter even though I was only a student lab assistant in his department at the Faculty of Dentistry.

He told me he had been studying depression for many years, his own and others'. If I was interested in reading his handwritten notes I should contact his daughter, Beate. He had left instructions as to where the notes were to be found, and had authorised her to let me read them. At the end of the letter he signed off: ‘All the best, yours devotedly, Ib Schroder. P.S. Say hello to Amanda! Give her the attention and love she deserves. She's the way forward for you.'

The letter was in my mailbox at the ground floor entrance to Nordisk Kollegium on Strandboulevarden. I read it on the way up the stairs to my room, South Wing, nr 42.

The phrase ‘yours devotedly' and especially the word ‘devotedly' struck me with an almost physical force. No one had ever written ‘yours devotedly' to me. It seemed a highly emotional way to close a letter. Later I found out it was how men of Schroder's generation usually signed off.

The fact that he asked me to say hello to Amanda didn't interest me much. After Amanda had entered my life as a permanent fixture, another woman had turned up who changed my life in ways I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.

 

 

Nordisk Kollegium residence hall was for male students only. It was sponsored by Nordisk Fjerfabrik. The feather factory itself was across the railroad tracks out by the harbour.

Living at Nordisk Kollegium was a scholarship; you had to get high scores on your initial exams to qualify. The residence hall consisted of two wings. The third wing housed the factory's administration building, with the dormitory's dining hall and student lounge on the ground floor. One of the provisions of the scholarship was that we were given two meals a day, served by women dressed in black with white aprons. Our beloved Mrs. Filt was in charge of the whole thing.

In the basement beneath the south wing was an indoor soccer facility. Every evening after dinner there were soccer tournaments. I was the regular defender on a team consisting of two dental students and three medical students. Not a talented soccer player, my only claim to fame was that I could keep going indefinitely. One Sunday I played 10 hours at a stretch. Soccer did not have an anti-depressive effect on me, but it did let me enter into my exhaustion and fatigue and come out the other side struggling into more fatigue and more exhaustion until on the verge of collapse.

I often kept going past the point of collapse and I would keel over on the playing field. Very few of my fellow players knew I suffered from depression.

One of those who did know was a medical student called Michael Bonnesen. He was doing a psychiatry internship at Rigshospitalet and had read my medical journal without knowing it was mine. We ran into each other in the hall.

I was sitting in the corridor nodding drowsily as I had been heavily sedated.

He sat down next to me. ‘Hi, I didn't know you had depression.'

‘Well, I do.'

‘Couldn't tell by looking at you. You hide it really well.'

‘Thanks.'

‘I'll keep it to myself, of course.'

‘Thanks, Michael.'

Michael Bonnesen was the natural centre of attention wherever he went. The residence hall was full of people studying history and literature, and Michael's friends seemed to have stepped right out of Danish history or Danish literature. He knew everyone worth knowing among the trendsetting, intellectual elite of the time: politicians, authors, resistance fighters, philosophers, university professors. He had sat on P.H.'s lap at the age of seven and smoked a cigar. He invited Mogens Fog and Elias Bredsdorff to the lectures and debates he organised in the passageway between the student lounge and the dining hall. Klaus Rifbjerg and Villy Sorensen often came and gave readings. Michael was on first name terms with all of them.

Now he was sitting next to me in the corridor of the Psychiatric Ward at Rigshospitalet. He was an eager sportsman with a talent for any sport he touched. Beside me he looked like a vitamin commercial. As for me I just sat there with my shoulders hanging. I could barely keep my head up. I looked and felt like a decrepit old man.

We had never talked alone before. Our relationship was limited to playing soccer, but you get to know people on the soccer field too. Michael was the same friendly, energetic guy playing soccer as he was at meals, parties, and debates, always well-mannered and considerate.

He was no different the day we met in the hospital corridor. I didn't know whether his friendly interest was simply because he was being polite or because he was genuinely interested, but he had a way of asking questions that made me tell him everything he wanted to know about my depression. I was so heavily medicated I could hardly talk straight. Was it the medical student, the future neurologist questioning me, or was it my soccer buddy from the dorm? I didn't care, I'd talk to anyone willing to listen.

When I told him about Amanda he jumped up so suddenly he spilled coffee all over his pants.

‘Amanda? Your depression is called
Amanda
?'

‘Yes, what's wrong with that?'

‘Is she always with you?'

‘When the depression is there she's there.'

‘And when the depression goes away?'

‘Then she's not there. I don't know where she goes.'

‘Do you talk to her?'

‘I talk to her and she talks to me.'

‘Is she there now?'

‘And how!'

‘Is she saying anything?'

‘Just a second, let me listen.'

I listened to what Amanda was saying. ‘She knows all about you and your family, Michael. She knows who your father is and your mother and your grandparents and your uncles.'

‘Hey, Dan, wake up, buddy. Dan, can you hear me?'

‘Of course. It's just that my eyelids are so heavy I can barely keep my eyes open.'

‘Tell me something, Dan.'

‘Sure.'

‘You make it sound like Amanda knows something you don't know.'

‘Right.'

‘Can you ask her something for me?'

‘Sure. I can ask her anything.'

‘Ask her what she thinks of me,' said Michael.

I did what he asked. He fixed his gaze on me and I knew what he was looking for. He wanted to see if my lips were moving. They weren't.

Then I told him what Amanda thought of him.

‘The key words for you are sympathy, affinity, affection. People like you. The opposite of sympathy is antipathy, aversion, dislike. Amanda is always going on about sympathy. She thinks about it a lot. I won't bore you with everything she says about sympathy. She says it's an endless concept, bottomless.'

Michael remained at my side until I fell asleep.

A few days later when I was back in the dorm he knocked on my door one evening and asked, ‘How would you like to meet my sister?'

I gave him my usual cold response. ‘Why should I want to meet your sister when I don't even
know
your sister?'

Such trifles didn't bother Michael. ‘My sister doesn't want to meet you, she wants to meet Amanda.'

‘Amanda?'

‘Yes, Amanda.'

‘Does your sister know Amanda?'

‘Don't you remember? You told me about Amanda over at the hospital?'

‘Sure I remember. ‘

‘I'm having a party in the kitchen on Saturday. Can you come?'

‘Sure. Thanks.'

‘See you there then. Want to play some soccer?'

‘Sure,' I said.

The first time I saw Puk Bonnesen, Michael's little sister, was when she walked into the kitchen passageway that Saturday night at 7 p.m. She looked like a parody of a well brought up, well-mannered High School girl even though she was 22. In the meantime I had gleaned some information about her from the lit students at the dorm.

She was a kind of prodigy. She had already written two collections of poems and a novel that was very likely autobiographical. The novel was about a love affair between a 17-year-old schoolgirl and a man old enough to be her father.

I was not surprised that Michael had a sister who was a successful author. Everyone in his circle seemed to be successful at something. I was surprised though that she wasn't more outgoing. When she gave me her hand she kept her eyes glued to the ground. During the meal she sat at another table with her back to me. A lot of beer and wine was drunk and most of us were drunk by the time we started dancing.

Towards morning a few of us were sitting around in Michael's room when one of the med students asked me about my acid trip. I was in a state of pleasant exhaustion, the result of several drunken highs. I had reached the mechanical doll stage. Whenever anyone asked me a question it wound me up and got me going.

It felt as though I talked about Amanda for hours. I told them everything I knew about her, how whenever there was something I didn't know, I'd ask Amanda and she would tell me. As usual I gave a precise and detailed account.

Then I buckled over onto the floor. Hands grabbed hold of me and carried me into my room down the hall.

When I woke I was nauseous and had a headache. Unlike other people though, I like having a hangover. When you're feeling sick to your stomach and your head aches, depression seems to take a back seat.

The phone system at Nordisk Kollegium back in 1967 worked like this: First, the phone rang in the telephone booth downstairs in the student lounge. Then somebody went to your room and let you know there was a phone call for you. Then you went down to the phone booth from your own floor.

All this to explain that the trip to the telephone down the stairs from the third floor in the south wing to the phone was something I had done hundreds of times before. When I was told there was a call for me that afternoon in March 1967, I had no idea that it would change my life.

I picked up the receiver and heard a voice I hadn't heard before.

‘Per Mortensen from Gyldendal Publishing Company.'

‘Yes?'

‘Am I speaking to Dan T. Moller? Dan T. Moller, studying dentistry?'

‘Yes.'

‘I'm calling to ask if you'd like to write a novel for us.'

‘Excuse me,
what
?'

‘A novel.'

‘A
novel?
'

‘You know what a novel is, don't you?'

‘Yes, but I don't understand why we're talking about a novel. I'm studying to be a dentist.'

Someone laughed at the other end. ‘Actually the novel is written already.'

‘Is this some kind of sick joke? Who are you? Are the guys laughing their heads off someplace in the dorm?'

‘Well, actually, there is someone in here listening.'

‘Who?'

‘Puk.'

‘Who the hell is Puk?'

‘Just a minute.'

I heard mumbling on the other end. Then a polished woman's voice came on the line.

‘Dan?'

‘Yes.'

‘This is Puk Bonnesen.'

‘Oh.'

‘Don't you remember me?'

‘Sure, Michael's little sister.'

‘Dan, I'm not sure whether you'll be furious or grateful when you hear what I'm going to tell you.'

‘Why should I be furious?'

‘I'm really sorry if I've done anything wrong.'

‘What have you done?'

‘Ok, listen, promise you won't be terribly mad at me. Promise?'

‘I'll be terribly mad at you if you don't tell me immediately what this is all about!'

‘I recorded everything you said about Amanda on tape.'

‘You did
what
? Are you out of your mind, you bitch? What the hell were you thinking of? You recorded what I said about my depression when I was plastered?'

‘That's exactly what I did. I've written it down and edited it. You've written a novel, Dan, whether you know it or not. My advice to you is to seriously calm down, read the novel and publish it. It will be quite a success.'

‘Have you already written the
reviews
of a novel I didn't even know I wrote?'

‘Yes, that's precisely what I'm trying to tell you, Dan.'

‘What in the world made you do it?'

For the first time Puk fell silent for a few seconds on the other end. ‘I'm sorry, I really don't know. Call it intuition, I think. Do you believe in intuition?'

‘Intuition about what?'

‘That you and I and two other people I know should consider a collaboration.'

‘Are you planning my life now, Puk? Any more plans you'd like to pull out of the top hat?'

‘Yes, actually there are. But you're upset so I suggest we terminate this fairly unpleasant conversation now in a civilised fashion.'

‘Now what would a civilised fashion be?'

‘It would involve your saying goodbye to me pleasantly whereupon you gently hang up.'

‘Goodbye,' I snarled and hung up.

Puk Bonnesen had made plans. If I didn't realise it before, I did now. When Puk Bonnesen makes plans they're usually carried out, not because it would make her terribly unhappy if they weren't but because she had a knack for making plans people wanted to be part of. No one had ever called her a bitch before.

The Amanda book that they called a novel was published and well received. I took my final exams, graduated from dental school, and worked at a clinic on Odensegade in Osterbro for a year.

Before that I had met the two friends Puk had mentioned during our first telephone conversation. Nora From was 22 years old. Her first novel had been published the year before, launched as a satiric novel about love. The other was Boris Schauman, 23 years old. I knew him although he wasn't really part of the literary scene. He wrote poems, novels, short stories, and from the start his success had been phenomenal. He frequently appeared in newspapers and magazines and was a well known TV personality. He was called the mouthpiece of a generation, a divine talent. In addition he was very good-looking, with the brooding good looks of an old-fashioned romantic poet, which didn't make him any less charismatic.

The question I kept asking myself, but never said aloud, was: What on earth do they want from me?

I was sure two of the others, Nora From and Boris Schauman, were asking themselves the same question: What could we possibly want from a depressed dentist?

Puk Bonnesen knew exactly what she wanted from a depressed dentist although she'd never dream of saying so. As the polite, upper class girl she was, she would probably think it terribly impolite to explain it.

I didn't ask, afraid that the spell would be broken and I would be left alone in the woods.

I knew from the start that Puk and the two others had a powerful, anti-depressive effect on me. This wasn't because I felt especially comfortable in their company. For the most part I found them annoying, challenging, mocking, arrogant, downright hostile, in fact.

What did they want from me? I didn't know.

Our first project was a TV series for Danmarks Radio's youth division.

Puk had got the commission and brought in the three of us.