Often I Am Happy Read online

  “It’s too late now,” I continued, “and besides, it won’t be more than twenty minutes by car.” Mie rested a hand on my arm. “Ellinor, I think Stefan is feeling that you’re dissociating.” I withdrew my arm under the pretext of buttoning my cardigan. “I know very well that he’s sore at me,” I said. She paused. “Maybe sore isn’t quite the right word,” she continued. “There’s a lot coming up when someone dies. Old feelings. I don’t think he ever told you, but for many years, Stefan felt that their father was more interested in Morten. He’s missed being seen and acknowledged by his dad. Of course that means a lot to a man. You were also more on a wavelength with Morten when they were young, because of his interest in art and so on. I don’t mean to criticize you, but over the years, Stefan has been going about with this feeling, and now his father is suddenly gone.”

  She spoke softly, in a neutral tone of voice. Of course, we could discuss things openly, woman-to-woman, now that the men were so hopeless at all things emotional. “So that’s why he was such a sourface,” I said. She stared at me without blinking, as if I’d said something blasphemous. “I was wondering why he would sit like that, like he was injured or something,” I continued. “Jesus Christ, Mie, how soft do you think he should be allowed to be? Your husband is forty-nine years old. He ought to have left that sort of thing behind ages ago. So he’s missed being seen! He still wants to be praised? My goodness!” Mie blushed a little, but I couldn’t gather if it was shame or anger. “I think you’re being harsh,” she said in the same subdued voice. “Harsh?” I repeated. “You know what, Mie? I think the two of you are being too sloppy. Too sloppy and self-centered, and way too domineering.”

  She looked as if I were some messenger from an alien planet, I tell you, Anna, but now the cap was off. I thought of Georg beneath all that soil, incapable of answering for himself. “It’s no contradiction,” I said. “Just look at Eliot and Franca. You crush them while you wrap them up in cotton wool. No one ever demanded anything from those kids; they don’t even know how to handle a dishwashing brush, pampered as they are, always getting waited on by this or that Filipino maid.” Mie’s face had turned all white. “Joy is an au pair,” she said. “I don’t give a damn what you call your Negro,” I answered, “but I worry about your children. I worry about how they’re going to escape your embrace. How they will ever learn to think for themselves and be responsible people on their own. And you tell me that little Stefan, who is forty-nine, didn’t feel that he was being seen…” Her eyes were full of contempt as she glided off the stool. “I don’t think we’re getting any further,” she said and made for the entrance. “Thank you,” I said in her direction. I didn’t know why; the words just flew out of my mouth. I remained sitting and saw her cross the street and get into the dark-green four-wheel-drive and drive off without looking at me. You don’t know how relieved I was. There is nothing like a conflict to do the difficult work for you. It is an underrated remedy, cowardly as we are, but it makes everything so much easier. Free at last, I thought, and stepped out to my bike.

  I didn’t go home. As I said, it is no longer my home, your house, our house; it is just a place like so many places. Home is somewhere else already, three empty rooms, so far, on a side street in Vesterbro. I checked that I had the key the real estate agent had given me and coasted to the station. The agent responded with astonishment when I turned to him, having looked around for less than a minute, and said that I wanted to buy. He murmured something about a house report. I asked when I could move in. He asked if I didn’t want to think it over. “I never did,” I said, “not when it was important.”

  The platform was empty, as if it had been the middle of the night. Only on the last bench did I see a tiny figure. I first thought that she was a child, the Filipino girl bending over her iPhone. Perhaps it was Joy, who also had a day off? As far as I know, they speak Spanish in the Philippines, but here the au pairs are called by English names, often slightly frivolous, much like the girls in a brothel. I am sorry, I lose myself; you have no idea what I’m talking about; but since you died, the women of the commercial upper middle classes have found a postcolonial solution to the difficult arithmetic problem of career multiplied with self-realization plus motherhood. You get yourself a third-world servant and call it cultural exchange, but nine out of ten live in the basement where the poor things can sit and Skype with the children they’ve had to leave behind with the grandparents in the palm hut.

  I thought of Georg as I sat on the S-train and looked out on a wide stretch of parallel tracks, a welcome interruption of reddish-brown ballast and glistening rails among the self-sufficient greenery of the villa gardens. I never felt at home out here. You did, and you had no problem transplanting yourself from the bungalow at the end of Roskildevej that the emigrant worker from Salerno had been able to afford after years of moderation. You slipped into this fashionable environment just like that, and from day one you looked like Sophia Loren’s little sister. I don’t know if Georg felt at home, but I guess he might have settled in anywhere. He had that kind of calm. His self-reliance was so discreet that you couldn’t tell it from his good-natured confidence in the world around him. I never knew anyone with a more undivided, wholehearted goodwill, and I’m not saying this to give you a bad conscience or make you regret that you preferred to throw yourself into the arms of a more flighty, dreamy man. Only later do we invent the reasons for our love—I’ve learned that much. What was it that I read somewhere? “Because it was him; because it was me.” It was even a man who wrote it, and it was just about friendship.

  But Georg. I remembered what Mie had said about Stefan, and suddenly I got mad again. I became so angry, so very angry, Anna, just recalling Georg’s gentle, heavy, ruddy features as the train passed the harbor. I caught sight of a white ship, bright in the afternoon sunlight, way out behind one of the fortress islands in the sound. I concentrated on my remembrance of the feeling in my fingertips when they followed the folds of his thickset face, more slack after all those years, and I promised myself that I would never, ever, go so low as to defend him against his own children.

  * * *

  I GOT OFF AT VESTERPORT and took the elevator from the platform with my bike. The traffic was dense, and the monotonous flow of sound and motion had a soothing effect on me. The suburbs are so terribly quiet. I biked through the theater passage and crossed Vesterbro Torv in the direction of Istedgade. I couldn’t help smiling. Junkies, prostitutes, and Muslims—it wasn’t a far cry. Stefan would never understand. Your son has outgrown me, Anna, and isn’t that the way it should be? I asked myself if Morten would be more inclined to visit me on Amerikavej, but I didn’t think so. He is a leftist all right, but for him it’s more of a cultural thing than a question of solidarity with the lowly. You never know what you’ll be met with down there in terms of bad taste and unwholesome habits.

  I continued until I reached my street. I’ve never been to America, and with my fear of flying I suppose I’ll never go. Mind you, there are no boats crossing anymore, but I also don’t know what I’d be doing there. The media are amply awash with images of America, and that will do. Georg never understood why I didn’t feel like traveling. I’m afraid he missed a good deal because of me. I tried to explain to him that I felt alien enough where I was, even though I spoke the language, but I didn’t develop the subject any further. I could sense from his look that I risked hurting him. If I was asked at dinner parties I would reciprocate by asking people what they thought they might get out of it. Sights are in any event more beautiful when photographed, and if you make do with pictures, you spare yourself the risk of bad weather and the trouble with finding a place where you can pee. Once you penetrate the exotic surface, everyday life in foreign lands has a disappointing resemblance to life at home. And if you stay on the surface for the sake of romance, you make yourself dumber than you need to be vis-à-vis the people you’re romanticizing about. Besides, you only become melancholy from standing there as an outsider, spying on
lives you’ll never share.

  Amerikavej. For years the name itself was all I needed in terms of travel. The street looks itself, and yet it doesn’t. It’s like taking two photographs on the same frame of film because you forgot to advance it, apart from the fact that no one uses film anymore. The lines double, the perspective seems to be slipping, and within that distance of smeared, skidding light I realize that most of my life is past me. I lingered for a few seconds at the front door, still with somebody else’s name on it. Two empty rooms looking over the street and a third one, just as empty, facing the courtyard. The floorboards creaked and my steps resounded, giving me the feeling that I was intruding. Upon what? Emptiness itself, the absence of a stranger.

  I wish that I could live here without any furniture or lamps. I would sit for days on end, leaning against a wall in the living room, and watch a beam of sunlight as it passed along the opposite wall, across the ceiling, out of sight. Watch the fading day and how darkness would rise forth from the bottom of the street. Listen to the traffic’s distant mumbling, voices on the sidewalk, an ambulance, a radio playing somewhere. It was like sitting in a parenthesis, a bubble beyond it all, as it carried on without me. I looked at the outlines on the wall, slightly paler, where the previous residents had their furniture or pictures. It had never occurred to Georg that I might one day be sitting in a place like this or come to live here. I told myself that the thought of it would hurt me when I moved in, but it would have hurt even more had I remained in a place of which he knew every inch. You must pick the more suitable pain, and I was never one to look back.

  It is so unfamiliar. I also never brooded over death or my getting older. Why would I want to do that? What else would I become? Did you consider death? Did you know that this might be—no, had to be—the end? Did you have time to think so? I’ve always said to myself that I’ll just proceed for as long as I can. I’ve said to myself that I should be happy as long as I’m able to move, as long as it doesn’t hurt particularly much anywhere. I was never very deep, although you insisted on the reverse. I can talk and talk once I get started, but you were the profound one, in tune with, well, I wouldn’t even know with what. With something I was never even close to understanding. When did you know that things were going wrong? You must have lost him in the snow. There must have been a moment, a few long seconds, when you were completely alone, but still conscious, in the middle of the whiteness.

  We were so happy, do you remember? It was an impromptu party in the sleeper car, cheese and ham and a bottle of Chianti wrapped in raffia. We were still young; it was still adventurous to take a train going south. You had called your parents from a pay phone at the central station in Hamburg to say good night to the twins. When you joined us on the platform it was as if you’d let go of the last mooring; you were exuberant, full of crazy whims. He was your lover already, and nothing in the world would have seemed more remote to me. We belonged together, the four of us, all the way through Germany. We changed trains in Munich and continued to Bolzano, where we changed again. You knew a resort in the Dolomites, and you’d called to book rooms for us. I had never been as far away before. I had never been farther than the Baltic Sea.

  Once we entered our room, I opened the window. It was late winter, and the snow on the summits resembled torn lace where the gray-blue mountainside showed through. I remained standing for a long time. There was a squeaking under people’s boots as they passed below me along the tall snowdrifts. Henning came up to me and put his long arms around my waist. I remember that moment very clearly. The strange penumbra of the valley after the sun had passed below the ridge across from us. The rawness of the cold in my nostrils. His arms and chest behind me, which I could lean into as if we would never be anything but together. You must allow me to place that image here, Anna. We must look at it together; please don’t lower your eyes. The worst thing was to lose you, but the second worst thing was that you never got a chance to ask for my forgiveness. You don’t hear what I am saying, and that is the worst. You don’t remember; you are not. I speak to you only because I want to be something more than an accumulation of facts and their succession.

  Henning was good at skiing and you were also pretty sharp, while Georg had done mostly cross-country in Norway. After I’d spent a few mornings with a ski instructor, Georg offered to take me onto one of the easy tracks. It became our daily routine: The two of you took to the heights while Georg and I went skiing among families with children. I clung to him in the lift and didn’t dare to look down. In the late afternoon we had drinks at the hotel’s fireplace. You spoke all at once about the view from up there, and Georg listened, smiling in a good-natured way. I think he would have liked to join you and try himself in the terrain. I remember urging him to go with you, but he just smiled. Neither you nor Henning said anything that morning about going farther up than the previous days. The announcement came shortly past noon, and you still hadn’t returned. Several avalanches were reported in the area; no one could say how many. Others were missing, too, but they showed up little by little. The authorities finally dared to begin the search a couple of hours before darkness fell.

  Henning was never found. You were flown directly to a hospital in Bolzano, and we didn’t get to see you until midnight. You were in a coma. They told us that you had been unconscious when you were found under the snow. Georg and I took turns sitting next to your bed through the night. In the morning, we spoke to a doctor who told us that lack of oxygen had probably caused serious brain damage. Georg went out to find a hotel. I stayed next to you, looking at your beautiful, immovable face. When he came back a few hours later, he had been to the ski resort to pick up our things. He had packed your suitcase and Henning’s and mine. He had been standing in our room among all our stuff. I could see him in my mind, embarrassed at Henning’s toothbrush. We didn’t know what to say to each other when we had dinner in a restaurant near the hospital.

  We stayed on in Bolzano. Georg had to call his office and ask for a few days off. They kept looking for Henning, but after a couple of days they stopped the search. Later on, I saw a paragraph from Berlingske Tidende, which had appeared on a page before the classified ads. Dane disappears in the Alps. It felt as if it had nothing to do with Henning. You were also mentioned, a young Danish woman of Italian descent, as if there were some connection between the accident and your father. Georg called him on the first night in Bolzano. He asked his parents-in-law not to say anything to the twins.

  Neither one of us knew how to express our feelings. Grief doesn’t always bring people together, as they say. Whatever we felt was blocked at the thought of the feelings of the other, and we said the most stupid, unimportant things, just to endure each other’s company. I spent the days at your bedside. You lay like some Sleeping Beauty. Georg would sit there, too, but he couldn’t take it for very long, your immobility in the respirator, as if you were already dead. Your calm breathing, as if you would open your eyes in a few seconds and recognize us and smile. Your conspiratorial, intelligent smile, was it to be erased forever from your face, whether you woke or slept on? I thought of the years we’d known each other, all the hours we’d spent together. I had trusted that they were being kept within both of us like linen in a drawer, ironed and folded, one set of them for each of us. It dawned on me only now how I’d believed that memory could be something to be had in common. I had seen you become a mother, grow into that role, extract that sort of authority from the girl you still were. You had seen me let go of my fear, ever so slowly, my fear of being found out.

  I called my mother after they’d given up on finding Henning. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever heard her cry, and I didn’t know how to comfort her. Henning’s mother didn’t cry when I called; she became silent, and I first thought that the connection had been disrupted. “So they don’t know if he’s dead,” she finally said. “So they don’t know it for sure?” I couldn’t think of a way to answer her. We had been in Bolzano for most of a week when Georg and I sat in t
he hotel bar late in the evening. Neither of us felt like going up to lie in the darkness, fully awake. I sensed that he had been drinking more than he used to. He’d had a conversation with the doctors earlier in the day. They had almost decided to declare that you were brain-dead, and they had prepared him for the only right decision, which would be to turn off the respirator. He sat for a long time looking into the bottles behind the bar, lined up in front of a mirror. It seemed as if he’d forgotten that I was sitting next to him.