To Siberia (21 page)

“Oooh, I feel so bad!” and he bends down to be sick, and he is. He makes rattling noises in his throat. Never has anyone been as drunk as he is. He holds on to his beard like Grandfather does so as not to mess it, and his head is heavy and hurting.

“Oooh!” cries Jesper, “I feel so bad, I want to die!” I shudder with joy. No one can mimic as well as Jesper, he’s the only one who dares. He tilts forward, he falls, he holds on to his ankles so he turns into a wheel and rolls downhill to land in the well. I laugh aloud. There is a splash, and first he disappears and then he comes up again, but not his head. His round back hits the surface, he’s still holding his ankles and floating like a ball with his head under water. And then he sinks again. The old well is so big that you have to swim a few strokes to get ashore. I can’t swim yet, it’s Jesper who can, but he does not let go of his ankles.

“JESPER!” I cry, and he comes up again, back first. I kneel at the edge and stretch out my arm, but I cannot reach him. Then I start to run. Up the slope and across the fields to Vrangbæk. I run as fast as I can over the stubble on bare feet, and it really hurts at first and then not so much, and I run still faster. I’ve heard you’re dead when you go under the third time. I have to hurry. The wind has dropped. The whole world is quiet, the sky above the farm and the yellow trees in the garden and the hill up towards Gærum where the cows graze, and the calves in the paddock stand still staring, they aren’t chewing, the smoke from the chimneys doesn’t move, and it’s a long way to the farm, much farther than before. I don’t understand it. I summon all my strength, the pain in my feet has gone now and suddenly everything eases, I take off, I fly, it’s the only right thing. At last I come to the first trees. I run through them and across the bridges in the garden straight on to the farmyard, and stop on the cobbles. There is Grandfather. I can’t talk, I point back the way I have come. He turns and looks that way and shakes his head. I pull at the sleeve of his jacket but he gets ahold of me around the waist and picks me up. He shows me my feet. My soles are nothing but blood and shreds of skin. There are red tracks on the cobbles behind us. I feel ashamed, I want to get down, we must go to Jesper quickly. I struggle in his arms but he holds me firmly and starts to walk towards the steps of the house. Then I see Jesper come into the yard, water streaming from his clothes, and he’s laughing.

It is September and suddenly there is autumn around me, the sky high above the houses at Fredensborg, it’s been cold for a few nights and this is the first chilly day. I’m freezing in my light clothes, I shiver so much my teeth chatter and I hurry along the road to Deichman. A rag-and-bone man drives straight toward me with his horse and cart shouting:

“Any old bottles and rags!” up at the windows on both sides of the road, “Any old bottles and rags!” and from one or two houses ladies with head scarves and tremendous forearms come down to the gateway dragging bundles, put them on the pavement and stand waiting with their hands at their sides and their heads cocked and eyes like narrow slits. They look fearsome, but the rag-and-bone man smiles. He’s been expecting this, he knows them, he cracks his whip over the horse and is lord of the street. The old horse starts and stumbles, the man shouts at it and cracks the whip again, but the horse can’t manage to stand upright, its forelegs give way, its whole body sags, and it collapses on to the ground, the shafts bend, and the cart slowly tips, I hold my breath, and the man jumps off the seat swearing loudly. The frayed edges of his jacket flap. Rags and bottles slide down off the cart and the bottles break and fragments of glass fly up and spread to all sides.

“You bleeding brute!” shouts the rag-and-bone man, “god-damned, good-for-nothing nag!” he screams, raising the whip, he runs at the horse and thrashes it soundly to make it stand up. But it does not stand up, just struggles to breathe so loudly above the sound of breaking glass that I can hear it right over where I’m standing, and the ladies hear it at their gate. Now their eyes are round, their hands hang straight down, and I run up and seize the man by the arm with one hand and tear the whip from him with the other and jab him in the chest. He tumbles backward, and I hit him with the butt end of the whip on the thigh, I hit him again as hard as I can and hold on to the whip with both hands.

“Are you daft?” he yells, clenching his fists, but he’s afraid of me and opens them again to feel his thigh, and then I hit him on the hand. He howls, a red weal comes up on the back of his hand and beads of blood appear on the weal. I throw down the whip and bend over the horse, put my cheek to its neck, feel the cold against my knees and the warmth of the big body on my jacket and stomach, and the only sound in the world is the painful breathing against my ear. I close my eyes, I’m tired, I could fall asleep now. The horse fights to breathe. And then stops. I open my eyes. It is dead. It just died, and at first all is quiet and then I hear running in the street.

“Is ’e dead?” says one of the ladies from the gateway. I blink, I can see my reflection in the horse’s eyes.

“I am afraid so,” I say.

“You’re Danish,” she asks, but it isn’t a question. I get up, brush dirt from the front of my skirt and pull my jacket close around me.

The rag-and-bone man sucks the blood from his hand. “Is ’e dead?” he says, “‘e’s not dead, ‘e’s the only one I’ve got. D’you realize that, you Danish maniac. ‘E’s all I’ve got!”

“Then you haven’t got anything now,” I say.

I turn and walk off. I feel their eyes on my back. The wind has got up, the narrow street is like a funnel that sucks in all the air and sends it out at the other end. The wind thumps me on the back, and in front of the steps of Deichman it comes from several directions, up all the streets from the fjord, through all the alleyways and makes free with the square, a labyrinth of wind, and the only escape is to go inside. I hurry up the steps, but halfway to the top I see it’s too late. It’s closed. I stop. The staff come out of the big door, it’s Saturday, they laugh and chat, and in the center of the group is the woman behind the desk I always go to. She sees me at once and smiles, I do not smile back, but despite that she stops at my step and says:

“It can’t be
that
bad, it’s only one day, and then we’re open again. Haven’t you anything to read?”

“Oh, yes,” I say. I’m shaking and don’t want her to notice.

“But you’re quite white in the face. You’re not wearing enough clothes. It’s really cold today. Where were you thinking of going?”

I shrug. Nowhere. I was not going anywhere.

“You can come home with me, I live quite close by,” she says and points the way I’ve come from, but I do not move. She puts her arm around my shoulders.

“Come along, you must get thawed out,” she says, hugging me. I stand quite still, I wait, I lean against her, and slowly I feel warmth come out from under her coat. I listen to her breathing. I don’t want to walk, I want to stand there for a bit, and we do, and then we go.

The horse has gone from the street I came from, the cart has gone, and there are no ladies standing in the entrance to any courtyard. I stop and look around me, I must have been dreaming, I must have fainted or something is wrong with my brain and I am seeing things that do not exist. But there are fragments of glass on the sidewalk. Someone has removed the worst of them and swept the rest to the side. Someone has removed a whole horse and a cart full of bottles and rags.

“Now he hasn’t got anything,” I say.

“Who?”

“A man who had a horse. It is dead now.”

We go past a block and around the corner to Rostedsgate and into an entrance where the stairs are paved with tiles in a pattern of stars on each step, blue and gray and pink, and rails of wrought iron at the sides. All the staircases in Oslo have wrought iron rails. “Solgunn Skaug” reads a sign on her door on the first floor. The corridor is painted blue and there are books and pictures in her living room, but they are not like the ones in Lone’s house. Here there are piles of books on the floor from the overflowing shelves, and the pictures are photographs.

“My family,” she says, pointing. “Keep your jacket on, we’ll warm the place up first.” There’s a stove in the corner. Solgunn fetches wood from a box in the corridor and an old newspaper. I go around looking at the books, I have read many of them. She bends down in front of the door of the stove, crushes paper and puts it in through the open door and lights it, then stays crouched down until she hears the wood crackling. She has fair hair, it is very smooth and cut straight below her ears so her neck is bare when she bends forward. It is very white. We stay near the stove with our hands held out in front of us waiting for the heat. I hear the wind beating at the window. I hear the clop of horseshoes in the street.

“Perhaps it’s still alive,” says Solgunn.

I shake my head. She takes off her coat and hangs it in the corridor and I take off my jacket. A desk is like a uniform, she is different without it and more so in here. I get sleepy. Solgunn picks up some books from a chair.

“Sit down here,” she says. “I’ve got a bottle of wine, someone gave it to me. We’ll make some toddy.”

She goes into the kitchen while I doze in the chair. There’s a little farm in one of the photographs. A girl with no shoes on stands in front of the house. I can see who it is. Perhaps I fall asleep for a while, there is a rumbling in the stove.

Solgunn comes in from the kitchen with two steaming mugs, and we drink toddy. It’s hot and sweet and slightly bitter, and I take big gulps.

“Not so fast,” she says, and I think it’s because I’m drinking too quickly, but it’s because I’m talking,

“I can’t understand the half of it,” she says. I’m still sleepy, and what I say comes quicker than what I think. I can hear myself telling her about Baron Biegler in the landau at night and the coins he throws to the kids in the street and Grandfather in the cow barn and Gestapo Jørgensen who hit me in the face and a year later was drowned in the harbor in a mysterious way. And while I talk and think I look at Solgunn who is thin without her coat, not skinny, but slim. She sits on the edge of her chair with her mug in her hand smiling and listening. She has lines in her face. I am not thin, I have brown eyes and large features and curves, like an Eskimo, my mother said once, and I tell her that too.

“Maybe a bit more like a negro,” says Solgunn, “only white.”

I have a round forehead, and now my hair is short the curls are thicker and more wiry.

“You must have been made for warmer climes,” says Solgunn. “Italy or Spain or maybe Morocco.”

“I was going to Siberia,” I say, “
Jesper
was going to Morocco, my brother, he’s there now, but he doesn’t write letters. He gets brown after just one day in the sun.”

“Siberia?” says Solgunn.

“Yes.”

“It gets cold enough here. Just you wait.”

“I’m used to the cold,” I say.

“Maybe you’re like Alberte,” she says, “in Cora Sandel’s books. She was always cold before she grew up and went to France. You’re aiming in the wrong direction.”

I have not read those books, and I don’t want to go anywhere now, I want to stay here. I fall asleep again, and when I wake up I’m still in the same chair with a rug over my knees and on the rug is
Alberte and Jakob
by Cora Sandel. It is dark outside now, and I see my face in the window in front of me and Solgunn standing behind me, her hands are on my shoulders, and she moves them up my neck, over the ears and through my hair like a comb. I cannot move, the rug is so heavy.

“Do you mind,” I say, but she replies:

“I want to make you warm. Don’t you want me to?” She comes around the chair and bends over me, her face covers mine and her fair hair tickles my cheek, I can’t see the window any more, my face is gone. I open my mouth slightly and she kisses me. Some women are like that, I am not like that, but if I allow her to kiss me I am sure she will let me sit in this chair as long as I like. She puts her hands around my head, presses it lightly back, and I think, now I can’t borrow books anymore.

I
  do not remember how long I was ill that time, whether it was days or weeks or even longer, whether I went to the doctor or the doctor came to us, but there were brown bottles on the bedside table and clear glass bottles of pills; I remember Aunt Kari’s face in the doorway and the pattern of the wallpaper that had vines in red and turquoise and little ladies with baskets over their arms. I remember I drank a lot of water, and the cold floor when I had to go to the lavatory with my legs shaking and the first dinner after my temperature was normal. The food all came up again because it had been too long since I last ate anything. I watched the day changing through the window on to the courtyard where the shadows rose and fell, rose and fell in a system I could not make out, because sometimes it was quick and sometimes slow, and I have a photograph that Aunt Kari sent me several years later. “My Bergen-Belsen Girl” she had written on the back. I thought that was obscene then, and it is obscene now, but I was thinner than I’d ever been before. I was skinny, not slim, and my round parts had edges on them, and it is true that I looked like some of the photographs in the newspapers the year after the war.