Often I Am Happy Read online

  She had made her decision before she reached her parents’ door. Her mother must have thought likewise. The next day, she went to the savings bank and withdrew the full amount on her checkbook. She put the banknotes on the oilcloth in front of Sigrid. Her father sat wheezing in the living room. “It was supposed to sweeten our old age,” her mother said, “but take it. Take it and go away.” They never saw each other again. The following evening, Sigrid boarded yet another late-night bus and put us up at the railway hotel in Vordingborg. As she went to sleep in the unfamiliar room, she must have thought that now Thomas wouldn’t be able to find her, should he finally come one day. The morning after, she took the train to Copenhagen. Many people were helpful toward the young woman traveling alone with a baby, a stroller, and a suitcase.

  She had enough money to move into a modest boardinghouse for a start. Being a lonely mother she soon got me into a day nursery, and she started looking for a job. She was hired by a cardboard factory in Vanløse, and soon after that she was lucky enough to get the apartment on Amerikavej, but her workdays were long, and she was overwhelmed by the fatigues of biking to and fro, summer and winter, returning just in time to fetch me. Instead, she had various jobs and places until she resigned herself at last to cleaning at a school when the children had gone home. It was tiresome but manageable, and a woman in our house was kind and looked after me until I was old enough to be alone.

  Sigrid exchanged Christmas cards with her mother’s cousin in Naestved, and she thought that if Thomas would try one day to get in touch with her, he would probably be referred to the cousin. It was through her that she received the news of her father’s death. Years later the Christmas cards stopped, meaning the cousin must also be dead, and after still more years, she figured out that the same thing must apply to her mother. When I look back on that period, I always remind myself that the loneliness, the hardships, and the recurrent thoughts of my father must partially have been made up for by the relief that nobody knew anything. Her loneliness was like a tundra. During the first years after the war, she must have told herself that she didn’t deserve the kindness that was occasionally shown to her. She must have felt like an impostor. When I had become a big girl, and she told me who my father was, she consigned me to the same solitude. We couldn’t even support one another. You are always alone with your shame, and it makes you almost hate the one you love.

  I was a mistake; I should never have been born. In the mind of my younger self, my mother’s love story could never outweigh the story of her disgrace. It was mine, too, and it has followed me all these years like a stubborn stray dog. No one has ever been more faithful than my scurvy mutt, and no one knows me better. One day I heard the greengrocer tell a customer what should have been done to my kind back then. It was in the blood, he said. I lowered my eyes, and my mouth ran dry as I waited for my turn. I thought about it constantly, beneath my other thoughts and everything that passed. I was always watchful. I had to make an effort so that no one would notice anything. “Ellinor is always so happy,” one of my teachers once said to my mother. My hypocrisy came off on everything, even on my joy. If someone would say something nice or just be dear to me, I couldn’t allow myself to take it in. It wasn’t me, after all. I wasn’t the person they thought I was. I was someone else, the bastard of the German-loving slut.

  It wasn’t that she had spread her legs to the enemy. Thomas Hoffmann had been no Nazi, and it was a handsome man my mother had told me about in a hushed voice, as if others were listening. As if she wanted to excuse herself. My spontaneous reaction was to become irritated. In the days that followed, I thought that it seemed as if I had known it always. I had never had many friends; my natural inclination had been to isolate myself, like Sigrid. Had others not avoided me without my noticing it? Could they see it in my face that my father was German? I stood in front of the mirror, scrutinizing myself. She had said that I looked like him. I tried to extract the features that were not hers, the afterimage of an unknown.

  No, of course he had been no Nazi monster. It was loneliness itself that was shameful. The secret stuck to us like an unwanted odor, the ever-lurching fear of being found out, recognized, pointed at. Vesterbro and the shabby modesty of it all was a cover, and we also lost track of each other. I avoided taking friends home with me and took refuge wherever I was invited. I felt miserable when I warmed myself at the cheerfulness of an ordinary family. If I spent the night at a friend’s place, I couldn’t fall asleep for fear of giving myself away while I was dreaming. I lay awake in the unfamiliar apartment, alone in the world, yet relieved to be away from home. I dreamed of disappearing. When I became a grown-up one day, I would travel far away from my mother and her story. I couldn’t tell my guilt from my impatience. I became the kind of girl who doesn’t stand out, good at finding my place and blending in. Opportunistic is the word, I guess. You arrange yourself with your shame, as you would with some deformity. So did Sigrid; she entrenched herself in it, and it made her haughty.

  She almost never saw anyone because she had me to take care of, and the women her age with whom she would sometimes make friends began to have children of their own. I remember her speaking with the other mothers at the playground. She could be easygoing and all smiles, and I think that she enjoyed the chance to sit there and be like one of them. As if she had a husband who would come home from work, and parents we could see on Sundays. In fact, there was no need for her to remain lonely. She was only in her middle twenties when I started in the first grade. In the third grade, I remember that we were called on by a man named Ejgil. He must have been fifteen years her senior, a silent, balding, blond man who smoked cigarettes. His wife had died of cancer; they had had no children. “As good luck would have it,” my mother once said. Ejgil was a woodworking teacher at the school where my mother cleaned. They had met one day when he was tidying the woodworking room. Two lonely figures in the empty, silent school.

  After a few weeks, my mother invited him to come and eat with us since he was alone anyway. That was how she justified his presence in advance the first time he was coming. The widower who came for a meal, as though he wouldn’t otherwise eat. He would come a couple of times every week. He always brought me something, a sachet of sweets, a bar of chocolate. My mother said he wasn’t to spoil me, but he just smiled. Sometimes he would read me a bedtime story while my mother was in the kitchen doing the dishes, and I thought that this must be what it was like in my classmates’ homes. I heard the two of them from my bed, talking quietly in the living room. On Sundays, he invited us to the zoo or to the movies, and once we went to Bakken. We took a horse cab from the station, through the forest, and he looked as if he was just as excited as I was. I got used to walking hand in hand with him; his hand was large and warm and firm. He put together a dollhouse for me and made small furniture for it and bought me dolls. Stiff little people who sat, legs outstretched, on his fine little chairs. I never played with that house, but I still have it.

  That summer, I was going to a camp on Bornholm. I’d never seen rocks before. I didn’t know the other children, and it made me feel free since we all had the same grown-ups around us, whether we had a mom and a dad at home or not. One of the first things I asked upon my return was when Ejgil was coming. My mother told me that he wouldn’t come anymore. I asked her why. She said that he had moved to another city. I could hear that she was lying, but she didn’t seem to be upset about it. “We didn’t fit,” she added, as if she was aware that I had seen through her. I didn’t understand a thing. Four years later, when she had told me the story about Thomas, I asked her again about Ejgil’s disappearance. “Did you not want him?” I asked. She shrugged. “Did you not want him because you still loved my father?” Her smile made me blush. “But dearest,” she said, “by then it was long ago already.”

  * * *

  MORTEN CAME on a surprise visit the other day. I was painting the walls of the living room. I finished a section while he was climbing the stairs. He stopped in the d
oorway and smiled approvingly as I turned to him, roller in my hand. “It’s going to be nice,” he said. “It’s going to be white,” I answered. “This is a funny neighborhood,” he said. I couldn’t help smiling. “Do you think it’s funny?” He gesticulated. “I mean, colorful.” I didn’t comment any further. I like Morten. It is my privilege as a stepmother, Anna, now that your boys are long since grown-up men. I am entitled to prefer one to the other, and I can’t even bother to make a secret of it. Morten I can talk to, only not about Vesterbro. He will always be a boy from the suburbs. Funny. Colorful. Seedy. Horrifying. He didn’t understand what his stepmother was doing among African hairdressers and girls in thigh-length platform boots. He said that he had some papers from the attorney for me to sign. He didn’t mention that it was of course Stefan who had sent him. Papers from an attorney have never been Morten’s field. We went into the adjoining room. He didn’t rise when I had signed in the places marked by the attorney’s secretary with small yellow vanes. He asked if I would offer him a cup of coffee. “Of course,” I said, apologizing all the way into the kitchen. Forty years of training, Anna, and I hadn’t even asked your son if he could use a cup of tea or coffee.

  He could use someone to talk to. It was still about his colleague at the university, his fling from last autumn. To begin with, he seemed ill at ease, not just over his colleague but also from just talking about her. After all, we were still mourning his father, and wasn’t that more important? I took his hand and squeezed it shortly. “We can talk about her if you want to,” I said. I could see from his face that he understood that I understood, and he soon found his tongue. It was weird to pass each other every day as faculty. She behaved toward him like she had before the affair, almost, that is; perhaps a bit more reservedly. As if it had never happened. They had met every afternoon in the apartment of a friend of his while the friend was away. It had been strong stuff to meet her on campus and make as if nothing was going on, knowing that a few hours later they would be in bed, embracing. I asked myself if he would have talked to me about his affair in that way if I had been his mother.

  “And then your friend came back?” I said. “She broke it off before that,” he answered gravely. “So she didn’t want to leave her husband after all?” I said. “She wasn’t ready,” Morten said. “She needed more time. She needed me to respect that she was at a loss. She told me not to push her.” He sighed. “Did you push her?” I asked. “She said that she felt torn at seeing how miserable I was, and because Masja had kicked me out.” He gathered the papers from the attorney in a pile. “Do you think that Masja might take you back?” I asked. “Never,” he said. “And I don’t want to go back. I don’t ever want to feel so…” He stopped in the middle of the sentence, searching for the right word. “Torn?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, and he seemed not to notice the smile on my face. “Doesn’t it make you feel even more torn to stand between two women who don’t want you?” He looked at me. “But that’s it,” he said. “That’s why Agnete feels that she’s under pressure. She tells me that she can’t make a decision as long as I’m…as long as she is feeling guilty because…” I lifted the coffeepot. “Do you want some more?” He handed me his cup. “So poor, torn Agnete can’t bring herself to perhaps leave her husband until you relieve her by recovering from your infatuation?”

  He couldn’t help smiling, either. We sat for a while without saying anything. He looked at the pile of documents in front of him. “May I ask you something?” he said. “Go ahead,” I replied. “The money you spent on the apartment…Of course it’s none of my business…” I put my hand flat on the papers. “Since Stefan knows, you have a right to know as well. My first husband, Henning, who died at the same time as your mother…” I locked his gaze with mine and made an effort not to blink. I had suddenly realized that we’d never talked about your death. Isn’t that strange, Anna? Georg must have talked about it with the boys when they grew older, but not when I was around, and I’m sure that he never betrayed you. It would have hurt them; it would have disturbed the trifling memory you’d left behind. “Henning’s mother had no heirs,” I continued, “and she left me some money I’ve never spent.” He nodded. “But why did it have to be a secret?” he asked. “Did Stefan say it was?” I asked. “No, no,” he said. For a moment I considered telling him everything, but I didn’t.

  You can trust me, Anna, as you can trust Georg. The twins know nothing about you and Henning. You were just friends. I hadn’t talked to his mother for a long time when I heard that she’d died. I would have liked to visit her in the hospital, and my conscience didn’t improve when I got a letter from an attorney telling me that I was her sole heir. I asked Georg to open an account for me and just leave the money like that. I believe he sensed that I was disturbed by the mere thought of it, and we never discussed the matter again. I had almost forgotten about it.

  When Morten had gone, I resumed painting. The roller sounded like car tires on a street in the rain. I always loved that sound; it epitomizes the city for me. I have always loved the city, Anna, including while I was living in your home, leading your life. I was never a suburbanite like yourself and your children. From time to time, I saw my chance to take the S-train into town. Georg didn’t know, and I always made sure to be back when the twins came home from school. I had stopped working, you see. I started again only when the boys began grammar school. My former boss had long since retired, and there were no classifieds anymore, but I was hired as a proofreader. That way, I got to read the newspaper every day. I know the words, Anna. I know them from my rainy afternoons on Amerikavej when I opened the dictionary at random or simply followed the alphabet. But I took care of your house and your boys and your husband for years, and I almost felt that it was mine, that they were mine. While other women rebelled and swarmed into the job market, I went about the premises, shopping and cooking. I escorted the boys to their soccer training, I had a grip on birthdays and homework, and I wasn’t bored. In a strange way, I felt free, liberated.

  It goes without saying that I spent a good part of the day on my own. At times, when I had finished something and didn’t yet have to throw myself into the next task, I would lie down on the floor in the living room. I lay on my back between the furniture with my eyes closed. I listened to the few sounds penetrating the wide, double-glazed windows overlooking the terrace: a bird, leaves in the wind, a car driving by. The soft rustle from a radiator. My father doesn’t know that I exist, I thought. Nobody knows that he doesn’t know.

  At other times I went into town, as I said. It came over me every now and then. I walked about at random from one neighborhood to the next. If it started raining, I would simply button up my coat and allow my hair to become wet. It always dries again, Anna. There isn’t a thing that doesn’t pass off. It strikes me that my account must seem sad to you, but I am not a sad person, and you know that. Often I am happy, as the song goes, happy inside, even if I can’t always show it. It is all just something that passes you by. You’re being pushed and pressed, sometimes even crushed, and you can be knocked off your course, but you remain the same on the inside. You grow older and the city changes, but they are the same eyes and the same streets. I had followed the same routes when I was a big girl. During the years from when I was confirmed until I moved in with the widow on Søndre Fasanvej, I liked to roam on my own. I didn’t want to sit at home with my mother or be there when she came back from work. It wasn’t that Sigrid was a tough mother, on the contrary, and if I wanted her not to disturb me, all I had to do was read. I read all of her books, and when I’d read the last one, I moved. I read or went for a walk when there wasn’t anything I had to do, through the narrow streets in the Latin Quarter or far out into Frederiksberg.

  Once, I stopped in front of a gateway on Smallegade because there was such a lovely smell of glue and freshly planed wood. There was a small cabinetmaker’s workshop in the back building; one could just see the dark-green machines under the strip lights. A woman appeared in the court
yard, wheeling a bike, and I was about to continue when I stopped again, recognizing the voice that spoke to her. The woman waited until he caught up with her. Two merging silhouettes in the gateway, assuming their features and colors again as they came out into the gray light. Ejgil hadn’t changed at all, and he also recognized me. The woman eyed me watchfully as we greeted one another. She wore a scarf tied under her chin, setting off her round cheeks. She must be my mother’s age, perhaps younger. “This is Vibeke,” he said. I shook her hand and made a flurried curtsy. “My, how you’ve grown,” he said and smiled, “but I guess they tell you so all the time.” I smiled back and shrugged. “I still have the dollhouse,” I said. “Do you?” His eyes began to wander. “Well, we’re off. Say hello, will you?” I turned around on the sidewalk to look at them as they continued in the opposite direction. He wheeled her bike for her, and she held his arm.

  Perhaps, I thought, as I continued past Lorry and the small gardens, perhaps my mother spoke the truth. Maybe she was never at a loss; maybe she never felt torn between the memory of a young German officer who read Ibsen and a not-so-young woodworking teacher who had taken the time to make a dollhouse for her daughter. Could it be that it was really such a long time ago, and she had naturally abandoned the idea that, like the sailor in The Lady from the Sea, her officer might one day return and take her with him? That he might return, after all those years, so that it would have made sense, all of it, the longing, the shame, and the loneliness? But if she had taken Ejgil, and my father had come one day, and Ejgil had set her free, gentle and magnanimous, would she then have chosen her woodworking teacher in preference to the officer who had let her wait for so long? If she wasn’t torn by an impossible dream, what, then, had kept her back?