Justine Read online

  Copyright © Iben Mondrup & Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 2012

  Published by agreement with Gyldendal Group Agency

  Translation copyright © by Kerri A. Pierce, 2016

  Originally published in Denmark as En to tre - Justine

  First edition, 2016

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-49-6

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  One

  An orange spot in the dark. A meteor has fallen. I head that way. Toward the heat. And the house. The flames are orange. They stretch up in the sky red licks the wood burns. My house is burning. People are here. They’re standing around the house that’s mine, and they’re watching it, or are also just now arriving. They shout. They draw, push, urge me forward. I’m standing next to the hedge. The flames leap hop, hop, hophophop from wall to roof to bush. My phone’s in my pocket. I can’t get it out. I think I’ve forgotten it’s there. No. I have it. And here comes Vita. She has a phone. She’s dialing. She says: Hello. She says it. My house is burning. The flames are black, leaping. You can’t save it, Vita says, she says: What’ll you do? Dry-powder extinguishing. Then the workshop collapses. It groans, cants outward tumbles inward. Settles onto the lawn pumps embers onto my hands. A child screams and cries. Mom screams the child screams for a mom. And there she is. I can see her. In flames. The fire devours a breast and an arm melts down to fat. Bent Launis shouts. They’re coming, they’re coming. The sirens seethe of wheels. A massive firetruck. A massive firetruck is coming. Firemen spring out, spring over great gaps, pull out the hose, turn on the spigot, pull on their masks, pump water onto the house and onto the workshop. The farmhouse roof squeals, bows, is warped, is coming down. Snaps. Falls. Ends.

  First there’s a headache and a throat and a person prone on a couch. They belong to the hands, which hurt. It’s me. It’s me that is me. I’m sure of that now. A growth on the couch, a cushion-wedged tumor. I’ve woken up on Vita’s couch, still in my clothes.

  I reach for something. A bottle maybe. No. A body. I reach for a body. I’m in Vita’s house. It’s Vita’s body I’m reaching for in the light from the window. Morning falls onto my boots. I lean forward to loosen the laces and see that there’s mud on the floor. Or vomit. My fingers won’t, and the laces snarl.

  Now she comes from the bedroom, parts the drapes with her hand, steps in or out. It’s not a Dream, it’s Reality in a shirt she looks like a young girl who fibs. Or a ghost, the way she blends with the drapes.

  “I’m here,” I say.

  “You’re here,” she says. “Indeed.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You need to sleep.”

  “I need to wake up.”

  “You stink.”

  I’ve got a uvula in my mouth and a tongue that’s swelling. I can barely get Vita down, it’s so crowded in there. She’s almost transparent with her eyes she’s seen my house.

  “Let’s go down and see it,” I say. “I’d like to see it, too.”

  “It’s not going anywhere,” she says. “In any case, you should do something about your hands first.”

  I’d like to go to the bedroom with her. She’s probably going to change clothes. Oh, won’t you stay with me? Go down to the house with me, won’t you? You and me. C’mon.

  I head into the hall and look at myself in the mirror. Strange. My head looks too small for my shoulders. Shrunken. My mouth looks like an asshole. Is that really me? Yes. You.

  I splash some water on my face. It’s so still around my face soaks the liquid up. Vita is somewhere else in the house, I don’t know where.

  “I’m doing it,” she says from that place, “Now I’m really leaving.”

  She evaporates.

  Three two one. I think.

  Water has scattered the pebbles. It flows out of the yard and turns into mud. There are trenches where cars scraped lines in the puddles. Grandpa’s gate is gone. I can walk right in. It crunches, I scrape the surface with my foot. Bitter is how it smells. Small is what it’s become. Flat under the open sky. In the kitchen, pipes stick out of the earth. The sink hangs counterless. My armoire is gone, yes, gone plain and simple. Grandpa’s armchair is just a jumble of springs. Plastic glasses are black clumps. No walls, and the worskshop roof is still on the lawn. The workshop itself, and everything it held, is gone. No walls prop up no works among shards of pots and glass, wood, paper, leather, brushes, sketches, cloth, and there’s the nail gun in a mess of rock wool. The neighbor’s tin shed has acquired a black façade and a fig bush with the fruit dripping syrup.

  Now Bent Launis comes.

  “It’s just awful. And all your things,” he says.

  He looks like he’s about to . . . no, Bent, don’t cry.

  “And your grandfather . . . it was one of the society’s finest houses,” he says.

  I see the house as he sees it, an afterimage between us. In the absence of red, it looks green, almost turquoise.

  “Of course we’d all like to see the house rebuilt. It was one of our gems. You’ve got insurance, right?” he says.

  “Just stop,” I say. “Just stop. Don’t you see it’s all red and burnt? I’ve got blisters on my hands—they burned inside, you know.”

  I hear myself shouting, and I hold my hands out to him. Bent takes them and says:

  “Well, for a start let’s go and put something cold on them.”

  He opens the door and pulls me inside.

  “Sit down there,” he says and wraps, wraps, wraps, and cools.

  “What were you just talking about?” he asks. “What did you say? There wasn’t anyone in the house? Oh hell, there wasn’t anyone, was there, Justine?”

  “No, no, no,” I say. “Who said that?”

  “Well, you did.”

  And then he wraps some more and nods.

  Avery young policeman takes down the report about the fire and the house. It’s all minutiae. He’s only asking the standard questions, he says, and then he explains the investigative process. It’s important, he says, to find the cause of the fire so that they can rule out criminal activity. Generally, though, that’s just important for the insurance, he tells me, and asks do I understand? Yes, I understand. Am I insured? I am. Who owned the house? I did. Where was I when the fire started?

  I sit on my side of the table and look at him and wonder if he knows it was Grandpa’s house that burned. How would he know that? He definitely doesn’t know that I have an exhibition in September, and that the artworks I was going to show were in that house, packed away in the plastic and cardboard that burned so beautifully. Actually, I was just waiting for the movers to come and pick everything up.

  “I was at the pub and came home and saw it burning,” I say.

  I wasn’t there celebrating, there hasn’t been anything to celebrate in a while, Vita doesn’t want to be with me anymore, and so I left. I just left, it’s been a while, a couple of weeks at least. Or was it just the other day? Last night? What’s happening? She was right there, now she’s not, and anyway, I think she was
there this morning.

  I watch the officer, he’s so blue. He watches the paper and the pen as it wanders the spaces. He flips the page over and continues writing on yet another clean surface.

  Vita didn’t want to go to Iceland with me. She didn’t want to go anywhere with me, she said. Why should she? Hey you, it’s over. Now she’s sitting at home and waiting.

  The policeman has finished writing, there are no more questions. He says:

  “Well, that’s it then. Goodbye.”

  She’s not here.

  And every last bit is burned. I try to remember whether I locked the door before leaving. Why should I? I never do. Anyone could’ve waltzed in and poured out a gas can and set it ablaze. She could’ve grabbed a bottle of alcohol of the shelf, and then voilà: fire. But who the hell would come up with that idea? Am I losing it?

  I feel something in my pocket that sends a tingle through my gut, a key. No. Two of them.

  Vita still isn’t home.

  Jens and Lisbeth and Peppe are sitting beneath the flagpole in the Society’s park. They’ve raised a T-shirt that’s currently flying half-furled and they call:

  “Justine. Hey girl. What happened to your place? Grab a beer, tell us all about it.”

  I grab a beer from the cooler on which Peppe sits. They’ve figured out how it’s all connected, they’ve just been discussing it, Peppe says. They’re certain someone’s after me, and I’m pretty certain of it, too. That’s what I say somehow or other.

  “You can always come down here,” Lisbeth says. “I remember your grandfather well.”

  Her legs are swollen, taut and glossy with a bluish tinge.

  Peppe cuts in. He says that he also remembers Grandpa. Actually, he owes Grandpa a favor. I can stay with him and Jens.

  They haven’t seen Vita. They don’t notice when I leave either.

  Beneath a piece of particle board at the fire site is the door to the small earthen cellar. There’s still a package of butter, a chunk of cheese, and an open milk. I wander around and try to comprehend it, find a banana-shaped sneaker, sink down under the apple tree, puke. Never again will I hear Grandpa growl his irritability about this, that, or the other, snap at him, apologize and sympathize and move on.

  I inherited his burned house. He wanted it that way.

  “It’s mine,” he said. “Hell, I built it. And now it’s yours. Basta. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that it’s worth millions out here, but you just go on and try to sell it, my girl. You just dare to.”

  He died and it still isn’t right. Not on the inside.

  Grandpa built the house for Grandma. They had a little apartment in the city and needed some fresh air. All the Amager Allotment Society had was a tool shed. Grandpa worked the earth. Good, slow vegetables, he said. Healthy. And free.

  He got the land right before the war, but he only built the house after the war was over. A wooden house. Forty square meters. With mullion windows and a blue door. Ample, he said, big enough. When Grandma died, he moved out there, and after he had emptied the house, he converted the place to a studio. All the furniture and miscellany disappeared. Paintings and siccative and French turpentine moved in.

  I did the extension myself. After he died. Now he’s died all over again. The extension became a workshop, which ate up a good part of the garden, though he would’ve been fine with that. He would’ve had a good laugh if he’d known just how much being insured meant. After all, it’s just clean air and a good idea some suit dreamed up, just a swindle, what a humbug, he’d say. You’re responsible for what’s yours. Why invest in misfortune? No. You’ve got to be careful with fire, that confounded woodeater.

  I know it. A bitter experience dripping with syrup. If the house burns, you can always build a new one, right, Grandpa? It’s not the easiest thing in the world, and certainly not the cheapest, but in any case you can get it done. That’s how you’d look at it. “Don’t come here blabbing about money,” you would’ve said. You’d do it yourself for nothing, your muscles all supple, just nail some boards and go to town on the rest, and saw, hammer.

  She’s such an ass. No. Not an ass. She’s the hole. The asshole. No, that’s way too kind. A shit. The shit that comes from the asshole, that’s her. Schluck, she hits the floor, splat, and, god, what a stench.

  Maybe she’s back now? She’s obviously been at work in the herb garden. There are the tools leaned up against the side of the house. The straw hat hangs provocatively on the pitchfork and wants to lift off in the breeze, but it’s still here. Vita really is no place at all.

  She lives in the Society’s sole brick house and that amuses her. To be suburban amid sub-urbanites.

  I piss on the potatoes outside the bedroom window. That’ll make them stink.

  She hasn’t put the extra key back in its usual place beneath the pot on the steps. I’ll check again. Nope. She’d already removed the key the day after we quit. She said that’s what happens when someone splits up. What a shitty thing to say.

  “We’re not splitting up,” I said. “When you split up, it’s much more official.”

  At that point she took the key.

  “Is that official enough for you?” she asked.

  One might’ve expected her to make an exception in this type of situation. Nope. Her key is still in my pocket, and there’s also one to Ane’s studio. They jingle.

  I look through the kitchen window at a box on the kitchen counter. Green tops stick out. It’s Thursday and she’s obviously not been digging in the garden. Today she’s at the studio minding the sensitive casting process, as she calls it. Anything can go wrong at this point. Vita is a sculptor. With a large sculpture at the Kastrup Airport outside terminal three. She entices everyone. She rolls out distance like a carpet that can’t be stepped on.

  Ane doesn’t answer. I let it ring a time or two. She said that I should just let it ring. If that doesn’t work, I should call again, because now that she’s nursing she can’t always reach the phone. She sets it down in various places. That’s mommy brain for you, she says. C’mon. Pick up. Now she’s picking up. Nope. That was just the answering machine. Now she’s picking up.

  She’s spent the day with the baby, who got through an entire feeding without any problems, she says. Now he’s down for a nap. I tell her I’m in the city nearby. I don’t mention the fire.

  At the door she already notices my hands.

  “Oh no,” she says. “You’ve burned yourself.”

  She’s been waiting for tragedy to rain down like fire, and now it’s happened.

  “I can’t help it,” she says. “All I really want is for you to have a chance at a normal life. Why did something like this happen to you? Honestly, Justine. Can it get any worse?”

  Now we’re in the kitchen of her apartment. The baby is awake and on its stomach across her arm, she rocks it soundly up and down.

  “I just don’t get it,” she says. “It’s just too disturbing. Let me see your hands. They’re completely burned. Who wrapped them? Don’t you think you should have someone look at them?”

  It’s not all that bad. In some ways, it’s actually quite wonderful that my hands hurt.

  “Could someone have done it on purpose?” she asks.

  The baby closes his eyes. I shouldn’t have come here. I knew that beforehand, and now Ane tells me that Torben is on his way home. He had a gallery meeting.

  “I mean it,” she says. “You can stay at The Factory for a couple of days until you find some other place. There’s a kitchen in the hall where you can cook.”

  “Star-crossed love is a costly thing,” I say. “She disappears, before long she’s completely white.”

  “That’s a strange thing to say. Why did you say that? Did something happen with Vita?” she asks, putting a hand to my cheek.

  I’m not a little child. Take that hand away, no, leave it there.

  Ane disappears into the bedroom with the baby. She peppers me with questions while I sit in the kitchen waiting on answers, o
n her, on an exit.

  “Thanks for not asking if you can live here,” she says, handing me a sleeping bag.

  It’s Torben’s.

  “You can have it. He won’t need it anymore. After all, he’s a father now.”

  Two

  The Factory is enormous. Its roof resembles a toppled Toblerone piece. I’ve been here before. And this is the first time. That doesn’t sound quite right, but that’s how it is. I’m the selfsame who’s different now.

  Here mid-break there’s no one, or hardly anyone, around. Light streams into the expansive hall through skylights high overhead. On the floor is something that might have been a wooden sculpture, now sawed to pieces. The chainsaw is still plugged in. Crates and pallets are scattered around, angular islands in the large space.

  Ane occupies a long hallway with studios to either side. Here it is. She’s propped her works against the wall with the backs out so they’re not in the way. All the paintings and drawings that she’s still working on. Empty spots along the wall show where the paintings were hung, and long runnels of paint merge together on the floor.

  The idea was for her to escape the baby when the time came, so that she could get some work done. The time never came, the baby cried and had an upset stomach. He always had to be on her arm. Torben didn’t want to hear her say it was colic. Recently, he looked at me and said: “Well hell, all babies cry.”

  She’s prepared the space for me. The broom is against the wall in front of a pile on the floor. The table has been cleared and there’s a mattress leaning against a file cabinet. I unroll Torben’s sleeping bag. What a smell, I can’t sleep in that. I try the mattress out in the middle of the room and also next to the door. It’s best beside the wall, I think. From here I can survey the whole future. It casts itself rather unsteadily down to the corner store with beer thoughts that make my teeth water.