Often I Am Happy Read online

  As the years passed, something hard came over Sigrid, and I think that she alienated people, possibly without knowing it herself. If I asked her why she never saw anyone, she would answer that she preferred reading to prattling. “What would I want a mangler for when I can talk with Dostoyevsky?” she asked, visibly satisfied with her reply. Or a woodworking teacher, I thought. She had always had her books, even before the story with Thomas Hoffmann. Her books and her ideas, however vague, of something more.

  * * *

  I WONDER IF HENNING ever got around to feeling torn. How long did it last, your secret life before the avalanche? Did the guilt have time to tear at you, or was it all adventure and lightness at stepping through an invisible wall, into a world different from the one you’d known? A different, impossible version that you probably hadn’t even fantasized about. Another mouth, another pair of eyes, other hands. A different smell. The adventurous lightness when the unexpected happens, and you feel that you yourself could be someone else, free at last.

  You were that lightness, Anna. I understand him. I could talk with him, and we could daydream together, but even though I was far from being the glum kind, he could feel very well how my inside and my outside personas were seldom in phase. I understand him, I really do. I’ve also warmed myself in front of you. When he found me and brought me along for chestnuts and red wine with someone called Georg and Anna, I was still this perished little creature, dumped out of a gray past not even worth bidding farewell. You seized every occasion for parties and happy commotion; you always found something to laugh about. Of course he must have fallen in love with you from the very first second, without knowing. You almost didn’t have to do anything to remind him, and perhaps it simply started as one of your sudden impulses. You were unable to pass a plum tree in September without having to taste what it had to offer. You have meant no harm, I am certain of that, and it never occurred to you that you were taking something that belonged to me. You hadn’t given the future a single thought as your moment spread. One would say that you had a better sense than I had of life’s opportunities. You simply had to feel with your own hands, your own lips, how possible life can be. Easygoing, that’s the word for it, and I felt it when I stepped into your place. Oh, yes, I said to myself, to think that life can be this inviting, even on a Monday. It felt like stepping through that invisible wall.

  We were terribly modest to begin with. We had to turn off the lights and pretend to be somebody else. They are the same motions, the same elevated wrestling, no matter who we are. As if we are mere links, for the duration of that moment, body-to-body, in mankind’s long chain of desire and reproduction, as in the Indian temple reliefs where they copulate in all directions in teeming, filigree-like eternity. In daylight, there were Ellinor and Georg, strange enough as it was; and in the darkness, there were two unfamiliar bodies falling into the primeval routine, relieved that we were at least not as alien as our bodies. Ultimately, anyone can screw anyone; only when faces are added does it become a story about something more than that. And faces were added in due course. I understood what it was about his calm that must have felt like a safe cave, and yet I didn’t understand you at all. Was it important that he was older than you, while Henning was your age? I had been mystified at the beginning as to what you had seen in Georg, but later on the mystery was how you could ever have preferred flighty Henning to the safety of Georg’s grip. Taking your place didn’t mean that I understood you any better. I love you, Anna, and I’ve never understood you. I don’t know what else would have become of me. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I have a lot to thank you for.

  Of course Georg talked to the boys before I moved in. He came over to inform me of the outcome of their negotiations. Your father had taken them to a soccer match as usual. In the meantime, I had removed every trace of Henning, and the apartment looked as if it had always been the home of a single woman. They had taken it the way boys take those things, fairly aloof. They had asked where I was supposed to sleep but didn’t comment on the answer. We were in the house, both of us, when they came back. It was helpful, I am sure, that your father was just as happy to see me as he used to be. The first evening was awkward, but it soon wore off. During the following days, I gave them to understand by way of little remarks that I wasn’t intending to make them forget about you or that they needed to stop themselves when they were unhappy. We talked about you every evening, and they told me stories from your vacations. It really felt as if you were sitting somewhere, listening. Like a bird on a twig, you sat, now here, now there, in my mind’s ramification of remembered moments.

  You were part of our everyday life, and you were quoted frequently. The boys were very helpful and informative at the beginning, when I stood in the kitchen in the morning, preparing their lunch boxes, or when they came home in the afternoon with a troop of noisy classmates. It surprised me how much they were usually allowed to do. You wouldn’t have approved of it all, Anna, but what was I supposed to do? Only after a couple of years did I begin to impose my own rules, as Georg and I had to tackle the tribulations and temptations of a new age level. I improved my grasp, even when things became critical, and I discovered that they had begun to trust me. Belatedly, I realized that they liked me. This wasn’t something they would advertise and yet I received, drop by drop, some of the love in which Georg was basking. We struck a cheerful, sometimes playful note that came to resonate with all the things you never say. I think I would have been a good mother, had I been able.

  Georg and I kept sitting and talking in the evening when they had gone to bed. We almost never watched TV during those first years. He talked about his childhood on the farm in Jutland, about his brothers and sisters and about his youth, or he told me what had happened at the office. He was doing well and got promoted all the time. I also told him about my early years, and sometimes I almost told him about Thomas Hoffmann. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. I was certain that he would have felt nothing but sympathy for Sigrid and me. I said to myself that it was just an old story from the war. Today, nobody would think of blaming my mother, or condemn her as they had back when she was expelled and she herself withdrew in disgrace and isolation. Still, I never said anything. It may have been the thought of his compassion that made me keep silent, and in time it became too late. As I got to know him better, I understood that it would have hurt him that I hadn’t told him the story early on.

  As time went by we didn’t talk that often about Henning and you, or about what had happened in the Dolomites when we were young. We got friends of our own whom you’d never known; we got ourselves a life. Little by little, our story became longer than yours and Georg’s had been. We belonged together.

  He made an effort to include my mother. She would often come to dinner on Sundays, she and your parents took turns looking after the boys when we were going out, and she was a fixture for Christmas. The first couple of years, we celebrated Christmas with all of the grandparents until Georg’s father and mother became too old to make the trip. I was surprised at my mother; she was lively and courteous, and it dawned on me that I’d never seen her in the company of more than one or two at a time. Nobody would have guessed that she was the daughter of a worker from Stege, just as nobody would have guessed whose daughter I was. There were hard, pointed seconds when I sat in my nice home and felt that we were frauds, my mother and I. The feeling has been there always, but most of the time, it was like a dark fish, barely visible, hiding in the mire under the days’ flow of events, doings, and planning. Only every now and then did it come up to gasp for air, during the night, while Georg slept by my side.

  I’d never been very affectionate with her. Everything between us had been so tied up when I still lived at home, and in the years after, I neglected to call her or come to visit. She wasn’t the one to butt in. She kept to herself, with dignity, until my conscience was too heavy and I came, edgy and short-tempered, already on my way out again. Georg must have noticed. With his example, he taug
ht me to care for her. She came to stay with Stefan and Morten one of the few times he persuaded me to travel with him. It was Easter, and that year, your parents were going to Salerno to see your father’s family. Georg found that it would be too much hassle to take the boys to his parents in Jutland, and he asked what I thought. My mother was tremendously honored by his confidence. He fetched her on Amerikavej, so that she wouldn’t have to take the S-train with her suitcase. Spring had come early, and we sat on the terrace in the sharp afternoon sunlight. We hadn’t been alone together in a long time. Georg and I were taking the night train to Paris a few hours later. “It’s a nice life you’ve got,” she said and closed her eyes in the sun. “Yes,” I said. On a sudden impulse I reached out for her hand, hanging limply from the armrest of her deck chair. I almost had second thoughts about it, but I did it anyway, and I felt her fingers as they closed around mine.

  She fell ill a couple of years later, and after a long period of surgery, treatments, hope, and relapses, it suddenly went fast. I came to see her in the hospital every day. She told me things she’d never talked about before. After I moved in with the widow on Søndre Fasanvej, she had known various men. She enjoyed how baffled I was. It had never lasted very long, but they had been more than just a few. It amused her to enumerate their merits and flaws, and how different they’d been. There was something almost frivolous about her as she talked, and I was surprised to see her like that, but why not go for it when someone showed an interest? In my thoughts, I argued that it was her merriment that made me feel nettled. But why? She never mentioned my father and soon became too weakened to speak for more than a few minutes. One of the last times I saw her, I asked if she had never considered finding out what had become of him. She lay with her eyes closed, dozing off already because of the medicine. She resembled an old woman, although she wasn’t even sixty. I thought that she’d fallen asleep when she suddenly lifted a hand and gestured, mumbling something I couldn’t understand.

  I came back the next day, but she slept most of the time. They called from the ward during the evening. Georg answered the phone. When we got there it was too late. The nurse had folded her hands. She looked as though she was just sleeping. Georg put his arms around me, and I hid my face at his chest. I couldn’t tell him how relieved I was.

  * * *

  I MISS HIM, my husband, our husband; I miss him so. There are times when I don’t know what to do with myself. That’s when I think that I’ve made a big mistake moving to Amerikavej. He would never find me here if he were to come back. I am not insane. It has dawned on me that human beings were never meant to reconcile their longing with reason, not at the expense of longing. As if I could love him in a lesser way just because he’s dead. That was never the meaning of words. That is why I am speaking to you.

  There are times when I cannot hold his absence, and the feeling is a physical one, Anna; it is not a metaphor. Then I walk the streets like I did when I was a big girl and later, when I was the stepmother of your sons out there in my self-chosen exile. Anna, I’ve promised myself that I’ll never see a carport again. I walk at random through the city, following my impulse or something that catches my eye. I forget myself as I walk; I am only these eyes in the same streets as before. Sometimes I go into the Latin Quarter to stroll around in the old alleys, or I walk to the end of Frederiksberg and farther, all the way to Vanløse. I have tried to find the cardboard factory where Sigrid found herself a job when she came to town, but I think it’s been demolished.

  You sit like a bird in my mind’s ramification, and sometimes you flap your wings, take off, and settle somewhere else. There is something you want to ask me about, I know. You want me to tell you why I never tried to find out whatever became of my father. Those things are possible today—they even make TV shows about it. Nothing is more successful in prime time than a choked reunion, but who knows if he would have been happy to see me? He had no inkling of my existence. But that’s exactly it, you will say. How have I been able to live with it? His never knowing?

  You don’t understand. After a few years, I realized what I think my mother tried to say with her vague gesture and her mumbling voice, dulled by the medicine. It was all the same. He could have come after the war if he wasn’t already dead at that point. He didn’t come, whether he was dead or he had forgotten her or he just wanted to do something else, and it was all the same if he didn’t come of himself. If he didn’t come because he wanted to, it didn’t matter to her whether he was still alive. I believe that’s how my mother thought. I ascribe such pride to her, but I also ascribe such defenseless trust.

  When I moved in with Georg and the boys, I had the picture framed of the two of you dancing a slowfox a few years before we met. I hung it on the wall in their room, so that they could see how much their parents had loved each other. It’s the only thing that counts for a child. We forgive our parents when they forget us, if only they love each other. I think about it every time I try to see Thomas Hoffmann, that late summer when he walked with my mother under the harvest moon, out at the cove.

  About the Author

  Jens Christian Grøndahl was born in 1959. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he has received numerous literary prizes in Denmark and abroad. In France, he was made Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres for his contribution to French culture. His novels Silence in October, Lucca, An Altered Light, and Virginia have also been translated into English. He lives in Copenhagen with his wife and two daughters.

  Also by

  Jens Christian Grøndahl

  Silence in October

  Lucca

  Virginia

  An Altered Light

  Mission Statement

  Twelve strives to publish singular books, by authors who have unique perspectives and compelling authority. Books that explain our culture; that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. Our mission is to provide a consummate publishing experience for our authors, one truly devoted to thoughtful partnership and cutting-edge promotional sophistication that reaches as many readers as possible. For readers, we aim to spark that rare reading experience—one that opens doors, transports, and possibly changes their outlook on our ever-changing world.

  12 Things to Remember about TWELVE

  Every Twelve book will enliven the national conversation.

  Each book will be singular in voice, authority, or subject matter.

  Each book will be carefully edited, designed, and produced.

  Each book’s publication life will begin with a month-long launch; for that month it will be the imprint’s devoted focus.

  The Twelve team will work closely with its authors to devise a publication strategy that will reach as many readers as possible.

  Each book will have a national publicity campaign devoted to reaching as many media outlets—and readers—as possible.

  Each book will have a unique digital strategy.

  Twelve is dedicated to finding innovative ways to market and promote its authors and their books.

  Twelve offers true partnership with its authors—the kind of partnership that gives a book its best chance at success.

  Each book will get the fullest attention and distribution of the sales force of the Hachette Book Group.

  Each book will be promoted well past its on-sale date to maximize the life of its ideas.

  Each book will matter.

  Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.

  To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.

  Sign Up

  Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters

 

 

 
100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share