The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Did she really try to poison Gunhild? Somehow that seems unlikely, more like wishful thinking, a predictably operatic touch. Besides, Niels never mentioned such an attempt in his letters, and given his obvious feeling of repulsion for Helle, if she’d actually tried to poison his mother—especially since it was his own birth which Helle insisted had tipped the balance—he would’ve been more than eager to fill me in on the details. A way of providing herself with a dramatic exit, that’s my interpretation of this story: instead of allowing that at the age of seventeen she boarded a train for the conservatory in Copenhagen, Helle found it useful to announce that her father had banished his criminal daughter from her childhood home forever.

  Of course it is possible that eventually Anders got fed up and threw her out. There he was, trying to make a life for his young wife and new baby, and there was Helle, busy composing a song cycle entitled Den onde Stedmoder. “The two horns of the moon never met in me. They met in her,” Helle wrote, “in June.” She liked the way her anger chimed melodiously against the edges of the rhyme, and the irony that her use of the melodious Neapolitan sixth (from C to E-flat to A-flat) granted the lyric. “Moon” and “June”—could she get away with “spoon” as well? No, what Helle was after was irony, not cheap sarcasm. She considered those things a doctor used when delivering a baby. But “forceps” sounded too technical, and besides, it didn’t scan properly. A knife? A silver knife? But she wanted the violence to feel like a secret: “With a silver spade,” Helle wrote, “my father scooped the baby out.” She could imagine the singer’s voice, a rich contralto scooping into the shimmering chromatic curtain of notes, revealing behind them a tangle of wet, red bedsheets. Hegel’s definition of tragedy always appealed to Helle: given two impossible alternatives, there was no solution. The horns of the dilemma were of equal size and substance. Synthesis was out of the question. You had to make a choice and then be prepared to live with it.

  The baby’s skin was white as snow, and covered all over with a pelt of russet fur. Niels, they named him, after Gunhild’s father, although privately Helle referred to him as Foxy. Her half-brother, father of Maren—it was almost impossible for Helle to reconcile that fussy, balding man from whom each Christmas she received a mimeographed letter describing the success of his dry-cleaning business in Frederikshavn, or his vacation trips to the south of France, with that small, pileous creature. At first she hated Niels; or at least she hated the way Anders sat enraptured as Gunhild drew a large white breast out of her negligée, its surface marbled with blue veins like a cheese, then nudged the baby’s mouth toward the nipple. “Isn’t he something?” Anders would comment. “Look at him go!”

  For a while Niels slept in a fancy wicker bassinet at the foot of the huge oak bed in which he’d been conceived—an act Helle tried her hardest not to imagine. Gunhild was a fierce and protective mother, rarely letting him out of her sight. But late in the afternoon when she’d fallen asleep, poured like a boneless thing across the mattress, Helle would sneak into the room and watch the baby. She was fascinated that a separate life had been consigned to such a miniature container, and a separate soul formed within the larger container of her stepmother’s body. Her hatred turned to admiration: how dauntless and brave the baby must’ve been to have held his own even when it was Gunhild’s blood that set him leaping like a tiny fish!

  Normally the lanugo, the soft fur that covers the bodies of some infants, falls out by the time they’re four months old. But Niels kept his well into his tenth month. “Don’t let them fool you,” Helle would whisper into his ear, which was shaped like a dried apricot, and tufted at the rim, so when she got close the hairs tickled her lips. She explained to Niels that his real mother was not the slatternly woman who eroded his sense of dignity by trying to engage him in endless games of peekaboo. No, his real mother was a fox, and when he got big enough, Helle would take him to the den. The fox thought she’d hidden it, but Helle had found it in a copse of swamp willow. Sometimes fingers would sprout from the tiny potatoes of his fists, and the baby would smile. Helle knew he was smiling, even though Gunhild said it was only gas that made his lips curve upward. Once Helle was so overwhelmed with love that she reached down and gathered him up. But then he began to howl, whereupon Gunhild awakened, outraged, and baby talk erupted from her lips, words as frightening and ill-formed as eggs from the vent of an undernourished hen.

  However, as Niels grew, so did Helle’s sense of isolation: Gunhild was clearly doing her best to protect him from his half-sister’s pernicious influence. According to Helle, Gunhild’s ideal was the pastor of the Lutheran church in Frederikshavn, whose understanding of the word “elect” held that one prepared one’s place at God’s right hand by exercising privilege here on earth. Though Anders never really took the hint, neither did he object to his new wife’s attempts at transforming the formerly vast, breezy rooms of Krageslund into boudoirs and parlors, at decking the leaded-glass windows with yards of drapery—a sight as obscene to Helle as that of the berib-boned key basket Gunhild had taken to carrying over her wrist, a custom she’d read about in a ladies’ magazine and which was meant to symbolize that she was now, without question, the mistress of the house. Before the advent of the basket, all of the keys to Krageslund’s many doors and wall cupboards had been tossed together into the top drawer of Ida’s dresser; nothing had been locked, not even the examining room cabinet where Anders kept his most dangerous medicines, nor the strongbox containing the pair of pearl-handled dueling pistols he’d inherited from his father, as well as the gold coins which had constituted Ida’s dowry. But once Gunhild assumed control, everything was locked up tight; even the drapes were tightly woven, letting in almost no sun, because she couldn’t stand the nearness of the bog, especially at night, when gases rose from the peat, assuming the shapes of the tortured dead, many-fingered and greedy for attention. By now, Helle told me, the household had taken on the form of a great spiral nebula: looked at from the side, she and her father weren’t visible, hidden behind the gigantic central cluster of matter and upheaval that was Gunhild and the baby. From above, however, they could be dimly perceived, guttering, in the process of gravitational collapse.

  What could Helle do? By the time Niels was four he would cry out whenever he came upon anything fleet or sudden, anything wild or inexplicable, such as the newt which appeared one day, its body like a drop of liquid trapped in a net of sphagnum, sunning itself on the doorstep. “Don’t worry, it won’t bite,” Helle told him, and Niels gave her the same worried, fretful look he’d given the newt. Nor did Helle make any real effort to court his favor, choosing to spend whatever time wasn’t taken up with schoolwork or chores at the piano. She was still struggling to complete Den onde Stedmoder, a project more difficult than she’d originally imagined: she still had three songs to go, and the mere act of tuning and retuning the piano took hours. Far from being an ally, Helle thought, her half-brother had turned out to be a traitor, although this unfortunate metamorphosis was clearly his mother’s doing.

  Thus she conceived of her plan, which she put into effect approximately two months before her anticipated departure for Copenhagen, on an appropriately wind-tossed and stormy night, when anvil-shaped thunderheads trailed skirts of rain across her mother’s roses, sending forks of lightning down around the house, setting fire to the garden shed. Well after midnight, Helle sneaked into the room where her father and Gunhild were lying, their heads thrown back on their separate pillows, their mouths open, snoring. She carefully lifted the key basket off the bedpost where it was hooked, placing her hand onto the keys to prevent them from signaling their sleeping mistress. According to Helle, the allegiance of inanimate objects was always unreliable; and there could be no denying Gunhild’s admiration for the keys, for their capacity to discriminate and exclude. But nothing went wrong. She speculated that perhaps her mother’s boot had assumed a role in this exchange. Or perhaps the keys were responding to a deeper form of kinship, for the truth is that Helle felt lik
e a key herself, cool and smooth, her destiny implicit in that notched part of herself which remained invisible under her long white nightgown.

  At last, like a character in an opera, she negotiated the stairs, holding a candle aloft to light her way. Most of the keys in the basket were fairly large, designed to open the doors of rooms. Of the three smaller keys, she somehow managed to select the one that opened the examining-room cabinet on her first try, releasing a smell of spilled rubbing alcohol and damp varnish. The good doctor, Helle thought, wasn’t always as careful as he should have been when replacing his supplies. She reached into the cabinet, her shadow climbing the wall behind her, folding at its immense waist to bend out across the ceiling, observant, protective. Maybe her father wouldn’t even notice that the dark brown bottle was missing. Inside was a grayish-white powder, harmless looking, though Helle had seen what it could do to rats. Then she opened the strongbox and removed five coins. Finally, for good measure, she took one of the dueling pistols.

  According to the pharmacopeia, one gram of arsenic will produce severe vomiting and diarrhea in its victim within three to four hours, followed by death from circulatory collapse. But Helle assumed that such an occurrence would be bound to raise her father’s suspicions: her idea was to break the dosage into smaller portions, administering it a pinch at a time, right up until the day she left home. This would, she knew, be easy enough to do. Gunhild expected to be waited on hand and foot; the poison was tasteless and odorless, so a few grains stirred into her morning coffee would pass unnoticed.

  At first, Helle said, Gunhild complained of feelings of numbness in her limbs—pins and needles, she called them. The weather continued to be warm, but Gunhild was always cold. Her voice grew husky; she developed a cough. “It’s your fault,” she said to Helle one morning as she sat shivering at the table, and briefly Helle panicked, until she realized that the offense she was being blamed for was leaving the windows open overnight. Anders, for his part, counseled frequent naps, beef tea. Indeed, during that first week he seemed unconcerned. Gunhild, as everyone knew, was as strong as an ox. It was only when her hair began to fall out, when she claimed to be too weak to lift Niels into his bed, that Anders grew alarmed. Of course, Helle told me, what she’d really been hoping for all along was that her father would figure out what she was doing. What she wanted, she explained, then as now, was nothing less than recognition.

  Still, it wasn’t until the characteristic white ridges began to form on Gunhild’s fingernails, the telltale Aldrich-Mees lines, that Anders actually knew. As Helle put it, fascination and horror are hard to differentiate, magnifying the eyes and mouth while the rest of the face remains about the same. They were sitting at the kitchen table eating supper; Anders was holding Gunhild’s left hand, the one with the ring, as through the open windows came the sound of crickets chirping, the unbearably sweet smell of decaying rose petals. Summer was almost over. “Helle,” Anders said, “come with me.”

  He led her into his examining room, where without saying a word he weighed her and checked her height, as he had done so many times before, making notations on a piece of paper. He pricked her finger, and put the slide on which he’d smeared the blood under his microscope, then asked her to take a look. “The round yellow shapes are the erythrocytes,” he said. “The others are leukocytes.” He was checking, he explained, to see whether Helle was human. Evidently she passed this test, because Anders next drew forth a chart printed with a series of drawings of rudimentary yet undeniably human forms. Helle’s stage of physical development, he said, was consistent with that of a normal ten-year-old boy, then asked if she found this piece of information pleasing. When she didn’t reply, he repeated the word “boy,” and she found herself remembering how the Nissens’ barn cat would choke up a dense wad of fur and bones, the indigestible parts of the mouse. Helle was to pack her bags that night and be out of the house the next day, Anders said. As far as he was concerned, he no longer had a daughter.

  When Helle told him he’d never had one, he laughed. Ida, he said, always claimed that she was different, but he wondered if she’d had any idea of just how different Helle was. Because whatever else you might say about Ida, she had been kind. She never turned down a single soul who came to the door looking for help. Did Helle know that when Ida once found an old gypsy woman rummaging through the kitchen cupboards, she’d given her a purse full of money and a basket full of clothes? Did Helle know that? Or how he’d felt the day he came upon the gypsy’s little dancing monkey tethered to a beech tree on the Six Bridges Road, and the monkey had been wearing his dead wife’s pink satin bedjacket? Oh, Ida’d made mistakes, but her passions had been fueled merely by a foolish need to repeat history. When Ida set out across the bog to meet Viggi Brahe, she actually believed she was elaborating on motifs established hundreds of years earlier by the Lapp princess for whom Krageslund had originally been built. “I miss your mother,” Anders said. “You probably won’t believe me when I say this, but I do. I just thank heaven that she isn’t alive today to see what became of you.”

  But he was wrong, Helle told me—Ida would have been proud. Unkind Ida, who one day had shown her that a note struck on the piano just once suggested nothing more than itself. A single note, Ida explained, was like an act of nature that took you completely by surprise, such as the meteorite which landed one night in the Nissens’ cow pasture, or the small brown bird which had flung itself against the windowpane while Helle was practicing her arpeggios. The finger of a mindless god moved, then came down suddenly. You could call it an accident, for there was no doubt that the single note shot through your heart like a stray bullet from a hunter’s gun, although it didn’t really have anything to do with pain. Pain had to exist in time: the note had to be struck more than once. And if you did so—struck the same note over and over—what happened was that the note wanted to resolve itself in its own dominant. D, D, D, D, D, Ida played with her little finger. Did Helle hear it? You could hardly restrain your thumb from falling onto the G. The fifth degree, the bass tone, the root of the dominant triad. Couldn’t she hear it?

  In this way Helle came to realize that when her father remarked on Ida’s need to repeat history, what he really meant was that she wanted to be more powerful than he was. Thus the weak could strike at the root of the strong. They could learn to exist in history; they could learn how to inflict pain.

  Part Three

  THE HARROWING OF

  LAHLOO

  I

  SO IT HAPPENED that on September 4, 1914, Helle Ten Brix arrived in Copenhagen. Copenhagen, city of towers! How clearly I can see her standing there on the Bernstorffsgade, a skinny creature with dark circles under her wildly staring eyes, an expression of dark determination on her small white face. Stiff, motionless—is she paralyzed with fear? No, the reason she doesn’t move is because she’s watching, spellbound, as one by one the towers of Copenhagen emerge around her, phantasmagoric, rising from an otherwise featureless landscape. Lavish structures, intricately shifting, no two alike, they rise into a deep blue sky: clocks rotating their brilliant golden arms, spires swelling into golden onions, the intertwining tails of bronze dragons, Jesus balanced on a tiny green ball. Rosenborg Castle, the Church of the Holy Ghost; the famous Round Tower, as gigantic and impenetrable as the eyes of the third dog in Hans Andersen’s story “The Tinder Box.” You never know, of course. Even a place as flat as Copenhagen can be host to magic. Even a woman as self-contained as a hazelnut can crack open and out can pour towering chords, arpeggios, a tinkling of bells, shooting stars. In the Tivoli Gardens, Helle told me, there was a tower made to look like a Chinese pagoda, and at night it was completely outlined in lights.

  Such happiness to look up instead of down, to have your eyes constantly drawn toward the sky! Helle felt as if she were in a forest of exquisite trees crafted from stone and slate and precious metals, a purely human design that would last forever. The lindens and beeches of Horns, though beautiful, were subject to rot and ruin, w
hereas nothing could touch the obdurate trees of this city. Obviously a different set of rules prevailed here, rules governing immortality, and she was now under their jurisdiction. She thought this, even though when she’d arrived in Copenhagen she was on shaky ground, being essentially impecunious—Ida’s five gold coins had turned out to be worth less than she’d hoped, just enough to pay the train fare and settle her first-term account at the conservatory. But on the night of September 4, as she sat in the Tivoli Gardens drinking a beer, Helle was still giddy from looking upward all day long. Living among towers can tempt you into complacency; no matter how reduced your circumstances, they can seem of small consequence in comparison with the vast reaches of the heavens, blue by day, starry and black by night. God will provide, is what you will find yourself thinking, even if you are, as Helle was, a nonbeliever.

  She was sitting at a small square table watching a commedia dell’arte routine in which two masked actors, the chalk-faced, moony Pierrot and the stick-carrying Harlequin, fought for the favors of budlike Columbine. Harlequin, in particular, was very good, capable of bending over completely backwards, his black cat mask staring upside-down from between his legs at the audience, transforming his smile, quick as a wink, into a frown. From time to time Harlequin’s crony, Brighella, would appear, licking his lips and rubbing his palms together avariciously. For the right sum, he would see to it that Pierrot was put out of commission forever. Thus—despite the intoxicating effects of the beer and the unseasonably warm night air and the exhilarating towers—Helle was made to remember how all human affairs, including the most subtle affairs of the heart, are subject to the laws of economics. Off to the left a band was playing “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” one of Gunhild’s favorite tunes. Helle could hear people singing along on the chorus: “She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see. You may think she’s happy and free from care; she’s not, though she seems to be …”