Often I Am Happy Read online

  “I saw them,” he finally said. He was snuffling and spoke in such a hushed voice that I had to bend forward to distinguish his words from the music in the background. All of a sudden he turned to me, and I withdrew instinctively. “In our room,” he said and stared fixedly. There was something surprisingly hard, almost evil, about his drunken eyes. It had happened on our second day at the resort. He had forgotten his scarf and returned to fetch it. You and Henning stood in front of the window. You had just time to let go of him as Georg entered, but only just. Throughout the years I have imagined the scene as if I’d been present myself, you and Henning at the window, both of you silent, Georg in front of the drawer or an open suitcase, silent, too, until he found his scarf and walked out without turning around. Did any of you speak when he had gone? Did you embrace again? Had Georg left you in a silence so heavy that it was still oppressing you, forcing you through the doorway and into the elevator without a word, like guilty children?

  I didn’t notice a thing; the day resembled the previous one and those that followed until you were caught in an avalanche. Only in the evening did you and Georg get to be alone together, when we’d had our drinks at the fireplace and eaten and had fun. I really think we were having fun like we used to, but I have a blind angle here. He told me that he hadn’t said anything when you returned to your room. He wanted to wait and allow you to begin. You said that nothing had happened. He didn’t answer, and his silence became a trap when you responded by falling silent yourself, withdrawn and sulky. Your mutual silence prevented him from asking or confronting you with the little signs that confirmed for him in retrospect that he’d seen what he’d seen. Little breaches in your everyday pattern. One evening you hadn’t been there when he came home from the office. You hadn’t shown up until an hour and a half later, strangely distracted while the boys kept asking where you’d been. One morning shortly after, Henning had called, and he hadn’t been able to conceal his surprise when Georg answered the phone. But did he really try to conceal it?

  The next day you and Georg were waiting for us in front of the hotel. I still see you with your skis, alone together, exposed to the mountains and each other. Georg told me that he’d asked you straightaway. You had looked at him, and your eyes had been unwavering as you answered him. Courageous Anna. He asked if you wanted a divorce. You said that you didn’t know. Then we came up to you, and the four of us walked in the direction of the lifts, just like the day before.

  * * *

  YOUR FATHER LOOKED A STRANGER in the church, the immigrant from Salerno, a short, lean man in a suit that was too big for him. He seemed as insecure as he had been when the twins were baptized, still doubtful, after all those years, as to how things were done here. You weren’t a Catholic; I sometimes forget that he had surrendered to his new country and allowed you to be raised a Protestant. You never took off the little gold cross that he’d given you for your confirmation, which had belonged to his mother. You wore it in your coffin. I don’t recall what the priest said. I also remember nothing of the gathering afterward, although I’d helped Georg organize everything. I remember the hollow thud each time the priest let a shovelful of soil fall onto the coffin’s lid. A tiny, narrow shovel like the ones the twins had played with in the sandbox.

  I’d never heard that sound before. I was standing behind your parents and your parents-in-law, who had come over from Jutland. The boys were standing between Georg and your mother-in-law. I remember their slight necks in the March sun and their blond hair, cut short and ending in a tip on their napes. They’ve inherited Georg’s colors; you would almost believe they were mine if it weren’t for their brown eyes. To this day I am unaware how Georg got around to telling them what had happened. You were just thirty, the boys were seven.

  I came by often, helping him cook, or I fetched Stefan and Morten from school. I had nothing better to do after work, and it was a relief to help him out rather than sit at home, falling into myself. I knew my way around the house and where to find everything. After you moved we had been the ones to visit; you had plenty of space, and then there were the boys. Even so, it felt strange to let myself in with the key Georg had given to me. Luckily, the boys had always liked me. I would normally do the shopping on my way back from town so that I could fetch them and have the dinner ready when Georg came home. I was never the cook you were, but the twins were surprisingly polite, considering their age. One of the first times, I made tiramisu, but I shouldn’t have done that. Usually, I said good night at the table. Georg had always been the one to read to them, and when he sat between them in the lower part of the bunk bed I felt how it would have been a violation by me, like infringing on a holy threshold, to bend over their boy faces, straighten their pillows, and kiss their cheeks. I heard them speak ever so reasonably with Georg about you watching them from a cloud.

  I helped in clearing your closets and sorting out your stuff. There were no letters, not a trace. What did you have in mind? Time and again I’ve asked myself the same question. Would you have cleared your closets yourself one day and gathered your things? Divorces had become trendy, in the meantime, but you and I were never trendy. The world had gone electric and let its hair grow without us. You were still too Christian, after all, and I was still too much of I don’t know what. Too cowed? Too doubtful of my own rightfulness? In the meantime, it had become trendy to screw whomever you wanted to screw, but you laughed once when I first used that word, making faces. One July afternoon in another age we were sprawling on a bathing jetty and talking about sex. How powerless the words had become, now that nothing was forbidden or just shameful any longer. Fuck remained too pornographic, but screw? You felt the same way about those words, and you laughed even louder when I asked what sex and work tools had to do with one another. What did you have in mind, Anna? I believe that you were honest that morning, standing in the snow, skis in your hands, bravely answering Georg’s question. Don’t know. Love doesn’t know, does it? It only has its moment, for as long as it lasts.

  As I walked about in your home, performing this or that basic function, I often considered what you might have thought of it. As I bent over to empty the washing machine, I sometimes felt as if you were watching me from between the closets in the semi-darkness of the hallway. I didn’t turn around, would not break the enchantment it was to imagine you standing out there, just a silhouette against the sunlight on the terrace. At times I would sit in the living room and close my eyes, and if one of the floorboards gave I would think, Here she comes. What would you have said to me? Would you have had an explanation? I don’t think so, but since you never came, since the dead don’t come, I had to explain for myself. I went much further by way of explaining than I think you’d ever have gone. Love produces its facts on the ground, like a bombshell at first, then like a long-term building project, and in due course the scandal and the rupture and the drama will no longer need explaining. There is what is. Love’s bereaved ones are left to try and understand. It is for the rejected to be noble and wisely realize that we have each other only on loan. The lovers arrogate the right to themselves by force, or what resembles force, and they wouldn’t dream of accounting for anything. Because it was him; because it was you. We who are no longer being loved must choose between revenge and understanding, and I thought that, yes, of course the two of you had to drift toward one another. I thought of the fanciful, the dark-haired and slightly adventurous quality about both of you. I would have preferred to be angry, had I been allowed to. I understood far too much, far too early.

  When the boys were asleep, Georg and I would sit and talk for a while before I went home. He also wanted to understand. We talked about you as if you couldn’t help it. Perhaps you couldn’t, but as I biked up the avenue I felt completely scooped out with magnanimous, sorrowful understanding. I wondered if Georg felt that way, too, alone on the sofa in front of the TV set, and later on in the bed that had become too big for him. I let myself in, turned on the lights, and began to gather Henning’s clo
thes and stuff, put it all into plastic sacks, and carried them into the basement where the garbage containers were. It would have been too scornful having to look at his shirts and shoes and his badminton racket as if he might return any minute.

  Spring came, and we could eat outside in the evening if the weather was fine. When the white nights began, we might stay on with a glass of wine and more often we spoke of something else. He told me about himself, things I’d never known. He had grown up on a farm in Jutland, but he hadn’t felt like working the land. Still, he missed the open country. He had once saved the neighbor’s son from drowning in a marl pit. He had found a flint ax and taken it to school, and his history teacher had sent it to the national museum. He smiled in a bashful way, as if he didn’t know himself why he told me things like that, stories without a point, bits and pieces of times past. To begin with, I feared that he would ask where I myself had grown up, but he didn’t, content with sharing whatever happened to come to his mind. Usually, you had been the one to tell stories and let yourself go; Henning and you had taken turns expatiating while Georg and I listened. It all became so clear now, but I had never given it a thought. Only when you and I were alone together did I talk more freely. You said so once. You told me that I was like somebody else when we were on our own.

  Georg, too, was like somebody else, or I felt that only now did I begin to know him, because he was allowed the room and the time to tell what he had seen when he was a boy and a young man. A private first class in the army, later on a sergeant. At first he had wanted to stay in the army, but then he ended up in insurance. He shrugged and smiled as if he himself wouldn’t be able to say how this had happened. I listened, happy that he didn’t ask any questions, happy to fantasize about a world I hadn’t known, of furrows, barn wings, and seasons. He laughed when I opened my eyes wide because he knew both how to drive a tractor and how to take a machine gun apart and assemble it again. One evening in early summer we sat for a long time on the terrace. We had finished the better part of a bottle of wine when I got up in the twilight and made for my bike. He got up, too, his shirt brighter than his face, and I couldn’t read him, only felt his eyes resting on me. He asked in a low voice if I didn’t want to stay. I put a hand on his chest shortly and said no. He remained standing as I found my way out.

  I could feel that I had been drinking when I followed the avenue through the pale evening. Everything seemed sharper, almost intrusive; there was a sighing in the tall poplars, and the glaring light from the streetlamps made me think of hyacinths. He must have looked at me that way for some time, but since when? Did it occur to him while we sat in the grainy dusk that would never give way to the night? Ellinor is a young woman. Ellinor has tanned knees already under the seam of her dress although it is only just June, her neck is long and downy, and her hands are slender and nice. Ellinor sleeps alone like I do. Perhaps he had opened his eyes to me while I brushed his boys’ teeth or drained the boiled potatoes. Didn’t I want to stay? What if I did? Life must go on, as they say. One can always ask.

  I was unable to sleep. I lay awake and thought of Henning. I lay on the side of the bed that had always been mine. It was still an unfamiliar thing, not to have his back and shoulder as a barrier between myself and the French window where the folds of the curtain moved in the chink of cool night air. His back had been a firmament of birthmarks. He couldn’t sleep in anything but shorts, even in winter. Did you ever get to spend a whole night together? I couldn’t begin to understand how you’d gotten the opportunity to fuck or screw, or whatever, in such a way that I never suspected anything. When did the right conditions occur? I suppose you needed to wash afterward. It does require certain measures: a bed somewhere, an hour under the marital radar. Did you check into a hotel? Perhaps I am being too conformist. Am I to think in terms of beaches and forests? But when, Anna? And what about the overtures, shifting gears from being friends to something more? I have such a hard time imagining this—what you say, how you do it. Did it happen while you were dancing? We always danced at parties; it is one of the few times when you’re allowed to touch without being a couple.

  You were a marvelous dancer. So was Georg; he really knew how to swing a woman around, but strangely enough the safety of his movements made it wholly unerotic. The dance became a scheme, a convention, not the prelude to something else. On the other hand, I never tired of watching the two of you dance together. Henning may have become aware of you that way, while you were dancing with Georg. That’s a couple, if ever there was one; we all thought the same: she belongs to him, he only has eyes for her, and their dancing is the cooled lineament of their passion. One could only be envious. There is a picture that was taken at a dance contest several years before we met you. The photographer has caught Georg just as he turns his face to look you in the eyes. You are dancing a slowfox, each of you with a number on your back; you are wearing a balloon skirt; you love him.

  Georg found the photograph in a shoe box when I helped him go through your remaining things. A box full of images from your life. We had sorted out your clothes and given them to the Salvation Army. There were also snapshots of Henning and myself together with one of you, depending on who had taken the picture. None of them included the four of us. We squatted in the hallway with closet doors made of teak. You never liked those closets, but they were there when you bought the house, and space always comes in handy. I can still hear you pronouncing the remark in a matter-of-fact tone. It was a Saturday in early summer; your father had fetched the twins and taken them to a soccer tournament. A ray of sunlight penetrated into the narrow hallway and fell over the black-and-white photo from a dance contest in the beginning of the 1960s. The distant past already, I thought, and propped up the picture on my knees, suddenly conscious that Georg was looking at me. “She is beautiful,” I said, determined not to look into his eyes. I had behaved as if nothing had happened after the evening on the terrace when he’d asked if I wanted to stay. What else would I do? He had seemed relieved, I thought, almost grateful that I’d let his words pass as if they’d never been spoken.

  I wanted to get up, but I was afraid of becoming dizzy. I tend to be dizzy if I get up too suddenly, and I stayed put in the same awkward position, squatting with my knees tight, caught by his gaze as I sank the corners of the photograph into the skin of my kneecaps. The boys weren’t there, so we had the house to ourselves—he must have thought something like that. The conditions were right. I told him that I was going to see my mother. It was true, but my words sounded like an admission that I’d read his mind. “Yes,” he said and was the first to get up. I stayed for a second with the old pictures because I didn’t want to rush out of the house.

  * * *

  THE SLANTING BEAM OF SUNLIGHT had receded into the corner next to the last window, as if it had pulled backward through the dust on the windowpanes. I looked around the empty apartment, as much of it as I could see from where I was sitting, leaning against the wall. This was a place where I wouldn’t for even a fleeting moment imagine that Georg might come through the door and call my name. Here I couldn’t even imagine the sound of his steps, the sound of the floorboards under him as he crossed the room. It came over me once more, like an attack, the pressure from within. The feeling that I was being driven out of myself by a claustrophobic, growing mass that made me swell. For a few desperate seconds, I could not breathe. Then I began to cry and fell over along the panel, crouching until it was over.

  I let the hour pass, although the floor was hard to sit on. Each noise I made rang through the empty apartment. Half an hour later, the low sunrays flushed with the indentations of the dirty brownstone facade on the other side of the street. A golden echo, like a double exposure. I got up and closed my eyes until the faint bout of dizziness had gone off. I opened a window and sat on the windowsill, looking into the street. There had been fewer cars parked along the curb back then, but the light of a late afternoon remained the same. For an instant, I expected to hear children’s voices resou
nd between the walls, a flock of them, spreading and coming together like sparrows.

  I was neither the oldest nor the youngest, just one of the pack, racing in and out of gateways, through the backyards and cellarways, around the corner to the butcher’s if someone had a few coins to spend on cracklings. This was a raw, snotty, unswerving brother- and sisterhood, kept together by the fear of perverts, the fear of punishment, the unreasonable enthusiasm for simple things. Raw, snotty pleasures, a rat cornered by the older boys, a penny found on the sidewalk and realized on the spot for toffees or Finnish licorice. The grown-ups had no idea of our whereabouts. Most of the time, most of them didn’t care much, either, and our expeditions would take us as far as the park around Frederiksberg Castle or the harbor’s southern end where we played among the heaps of coal. Invariably, I came home with my clothes torn, and my mother always worried about me, but in her case it was an attitude rather than a notion of real threats, apart from the perpetual stories about flashers and indecency.

  My thin, frightened little mother. She laundered and mangled for people and worked as a cleaning woman in a school, not mine, thank God, and she could just make ends meet, bursting from the effort. She had been beautiful, almost as beautiful as you were, and the proof had been framed in gold, with a flap on the back, and placed between a porcelain nymph and a leather-bound edition of the Dictionary of the Danish Language that I’d never seen her open. I opened it myself when it was raining and I couldn’t go out. I read the words, column after column, as I waited for the rain to stop. My mother had been a buxom beauty from Stege, but the years and the hardships had made every part of her shrink except for the nose, which made her look like a clipped puffin, immovable on its cornice in the storm.