The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  But who, in fact, would have suspected that Helle was anything other than what she appeared to be, just another happy, carefree beer drinker, a small young man of bohemian disposition, probably a student? She was wearing a man’s white shirt and black trousers, a black silk vest and a blue silk cravat, a dove-gray fedora, underneath which her still-long hair was carefully braided and tightly pinned to her scalp. “Like George Sand,” Viggi Brahe had said when she’d tried on the outfit for his benefit. It was the least she could do, since he’d given it to her, as well as a slightly mildewed Gladstone bag in which he’d packed another shirt, butter yellow; an emerald-green cravat; a pair of beige twill trousers. Otherwise, in the three years since the production of Det omflakkende Møl, Helle had done her best to avoid Viggi Brahe, whose former interest in patronage had been replaced by an interest in horticulture, specifically poppies, to support a rumored opium addiction. “You look more like Ida every day,” he’d said, though his mind was obviously clouded by the drug.

  Helle ordered another beer. It was going on eleven o’clock, late enough so another half hour wouldn’t make much difference; if need be, she thought, she could find somewhere to sleep in the gardens, curling up on a soft, shadowy patch of grass within an elder thicket, the way the foxes did back home. The brass band was playing a waltz—Prince Orlofsky’s ball in Fledermaus, just before the fateful striking of the clock—and couples were swooping, batlike, in front of the bandstand, their bodies welling up out of the darkness, brightly visible, then submerging as they waltzed in and out of the small pools of light cast by hundreds of faintly swaying Japanese lanterns. The beer tasted delicious. Nor did Helle bother to wipe away the foam mustache, figuring it added to her disguise. Nightjars were flying overhead—birds that roosted by day on the city’s towers—and she could hear their eerie nocturnal cries, which could be easily confused with the sounds of mole crickets, if you didn’t know better.

  Meanwhile, tobacco smoke drifted in her direction from a neighboring table where two sailors, apparently no older than she was, rested their elbows among a great many empty beer mugs, their dark blue caps set at jaunty angles, their eyes pink and restless. How good it smelled, that smoke! All of a sudden what Helle wanted more than anything in the world was one of those exotic black cylinders tipped in gold. But how should she address them? And though her voice, even then, was husky and deep for a girl, she hadn’t tried it out yet on strangers. If they guessed she was an impostor, would they rob and rape her? She must have been staring at them, because suddenly one of the sailors leaned over and asked her what was so goddamn fascinating. Never seen a sailor before? Then they both laughed, regarding her with the kind of good humor the bully accords his victim before pounding him into the ground.

  Only Marius Finsen and Kai Borge—Dancer and Kayo—weren’t bullies, but two merchant sailors who decided, for some reason Helle never fully understood, to take her under their wing. Perhaps they’d perceived themselves to be a duet which couldn’t achieve true musical brilliance except by expanding into a trio—beauty and brawn requiring brains to lend tension to a melody that would otherwise remain merely charming. Whatever the reason, in time Helle came to think of them as the lively, untamed brothers she’d always wanted, although it was Dancer with whom she would develop the more complex, potentially sinister relationship. Not another mariage faux, but a second category, which later quite possibly included Sam.

  While it was Kayo—big, apparently dull-witted Kayo, destined to die two years later in the Battle of Jutland—who immediately saw through Helle’s disguise as they made their way drunkenly down the Østergade that night, Kayo who took Helle’s hand and pulled her to a stop while Dancer continued toward the harbor. “You’re a girl, aren’t you?” he asked, and when Helle admitted that she was, he nodded his overlarge, hairy head, like a buffalo’s, and grinned. He had two sisters, Kayo explained; and women walked differently because of the way they were built. Then he blushed. Luckily for Helle, even though the boardinghouse where he and Dancer were staying was small, there was an empty room, a closet really—she could sleep there, at least for the night, until she found something better. Obviously she hadn’t realized, had she, how dangerous the Copenhagen harbor was after dark, teeming with criminals and madmen. No place for a girl, even a tough little thing like herself.

  As it turned out, the boardinghouse to which Kayo led her was located in the harbor’s disreputable heart, right on that narrow channel called the Nyhavn: number 22, one door down from the house where Hans Andersen lived when he was writing his first fairy tales, two doors down from number 18, where he died. The house was white-painted stucco, four stories tall, but it wasn’t until the following morning that Helle could see its façade clearly, as well as the still life—a conch shell, an ivy trained into the shape of a heart, a china polar bear standing on its hind legs, a wooden crucifix, a tinted engraving showing a cottage clinging, limpetlike, to the side of an alp—which the landlady, the notorious Daisy Huj og Hast, had arranged in the first-story window.

  Such still lifes were in evidence throughout the city; they were, according to Helle, the Danish equivalent of the lawn art you saw in Canaan’s less fortunate neighborhoods, those arrangements of silver balls and gnomes and whirling ducks and frozen squirrels. If you sneaked up on these still lifes at night, Helle claimed, you could hear the objects chattering away: “Now the drowned sailors do their dance before the throne of the Sea Witch; they hope she’ll send their souls to heaven, but she wants them for her own,” the conch shell would be saying, only to be interrupted by the polar bear, its voice surprisingly soft, childish: “I have eaten three men, and so I can tell you that a human heart is harder to swallow than the heart of the oldest, toughest walrus.” “Have you seen them, have you seen them,” the engraving would ask, “the goatherd’s family under the thick blankets of an avalanche, all of them dreaming the same dream? They think they’re standing on a mountaintop, surveying the whole frozen world,” to which the ivy would reply, “Sweethearts, sweethearts! Watch them kissing in the parlor!” Meanwhile, the tiny Christ mounted on the crucifix said nothing.

  The author of this still life was, however, fast asleep when Helle made her original appearance on that well-scrubbed doorstep with her new companions. They had to be careful not to knock over the dark blue bicycle leaning against the wall in the entryway. Dancer said that even though “the old girl” was over fifty, twice a year she rode her bicycle from Copenhagen to Odense, well over one hundred kilometers, in order to visit her brother and his wife. If Daisy liked you, Dancer said, then there wasn’t a thing to worry about. Handsome, with tightly curled chestnut hair and wide-set, slanting eyes, Dancer had the fixed smile of a young man who knew he was physically attractive and who was, consequently, suspicious of any display of affection. He came from Kunø, in the Faroe Islands, where he’d spent most of his life on boats, so that even when he walked on dry land it was with a rhythmic, faintly syncopated sway—with the dip and glide characteristic of such exotic dances as the tango, hence his nickname. Kunø, Dancer explained, was composed entirely of mountains, and his village had been built in the one place where there was a slight break in the chain. Until he came to Copenhagen Dancer had never eaten anything but fish—the famous Faroese klipfisk, or salt cod, which the king of Spain himself considered a great delicacy. He hadn’t known what a vegetable was until Daisy served him a plateful of spring asparagus.

  Initially Helle felt nervous around Dancer—everyone did, she said, with the exception of Daisy, who clearly adored him. Even later, when their friendship became more intimate, Helle remained slightly tense in his presence. That first night, it was with something approaching fear that she watched Dancer take the stairs two at a time, lightly, on the balls of his feet, marveling that anyone could move so fast and still manage to convey an impression of languor, of sexual appetite recently appeased yet once again stirring. Did he have a woman hidden away in his room? Certainly he didn’t show any sign of drunkenness,
even though Kayo displayed several and he’d had much less to drink. When he got to the first landing, Dancer looked back, briefly, over his shoulder. “Shhh,” he said, making a pillow of his hands on which he pretended to rest his head, and then pointing toward the door to Daisy’s apartment. “A light sleeper,” Kayo explained. “Light?” hissed Dancer. “She doesn’t sleep at all. She’s like goddamn Fafnir.”

  The closet was on the top floor of the house, on the harbor side, the odd slope of its exterior wall determined by the mansard roof. A room into which you could fit yourself and nothing more, Helle thought, after Kayo had tugged the door open for her, releasing the damp, clabbered smell of old clothes and dust. A room like a husk, a shell. Through the unblinking eye of a single round window a moonbeam, quivering and waterlogged, illuminated a narrow metal bedstead, hemmed in on either side by rows of shelves piled with canning jars and boxes.

  It was smaller than he’d remembered, Kayo said. Would Helle be all right? And then, probably because exhaustion had given her face a pinched and frightened look, he paused to reassure her that he wasn’t planning to try anything, if that was what had her worried. For, as Kayo went on to explain, he’d grown up on a mangel beet farm in north Zealand, where, unlike Dancer’s, his knowledge of boats and women had been limited to taking his sisters for rides in a leaky rowboat on a weed-choked pond. From the time he was a little boy, all he’d wanted to do was become a sailor and escape the crushing life of the farmer, stuck like his father on one small piece of dirt for the rest of his life. Women were safe with him, Kayo promised. Helle reminded him of his favorite sister, Maja, the youngest; she, too, was a deep one. “Sweet dreams,” he said, backing away into the shadows, disappearing into his own room on the other side of the hall. It didn’t seem to make any difference that the bed was hard as a rock, that the pillow was moist and sour, that the duvet’s stitching had come undone so the down rested in a single heavy lump on top of her feet—Helle fell asleep almost immediately. The last thing she recalled hearing was the sound of Kayo’s voice, that high-pitched and lilting voice you sometimes run across in very large men; Kayo was saying his prayers.

  In the morning he introduced her to Daisy, who was sitting in her dining room, drinking coffee and talking to Dancer. Daisy Huj og Hast had been married at the age of sixteen to a sailor, a nice boy whom she’d hardly gotten to know before he was drowned in a freak accident off the Swedish coast. She had been at one time a great beauty: you knew this not only because she told you so but because she conducted herself like a woman accustomed to receiving the admiration of others. Her alliance with Dancer, Helle said, was based upon this obvious similarity between them—whatever is beautiful in this world is always under assault. The world wants to discover the hidden flaw, and if one isn’t readily apparent, then the world will strive to create it. Dancer’s solution was to hold himself aloof, whereas Daisy’s was to strike a series of preemptive blows, constantly reminding the world in advance of her shortcomings, each of which she managed to present as an asset. “I don’t know why it is, but I’ve always hated the weak,” she would announce ruefully the minute Oluf Froulund, the middle-aged man with a limp who lived in the room to the right of Helle’s closet, had left the table.

  Daisy’s hair was pure white, almost transparent, and she wore it coiled into a thick knot at the top of her head. Her skin, too, had a transparent quality, through which you could see the perfection of the underlying structure, the wide blades of her cheekbones, the delicate sockets out of which her pale blue eyes regarded you with an unsettling combination of irony and sincerity. “Good morning, Henning,” she said, sitting there with her back erect, gracefully buttering a slice of fuldkorn, that grainiest of the Danish breads, before taking a bite; Daisy still had all of her teeth, a miracle in those days. The house, she explained, was already filled with more lodgers than she could handle. Still, there was probably room for one more. “My friends accuse me of being too soft-hearted,” Daisy confessed, turning to Dancer, sighing and tossing her head, providing a clear image of what she must have looked like as a tender, flirtatious girl. She guessed such soft-heartedness came of never having had any children of her own.

  The dining room was like a cave, warm and windowless, heated by a ceiling-high stove—a larger, tiled version of the stove in Helle’s trailer—its tiles the same forest green as the wainscoting, above whose panels you could barely make out the pale pink of the walls, concealed beneath a shadowy array of paintings and photographs, antique pipes, clocks, omelette pans, butter molds, and what appeared to be door latches. Every available surface—the plate rail, the immense seaman’s chest, the gargantuan oak sideboard—was covered with china figurines: shepherdesses and chimney sweeps, lords and ladies, geese and ganders, rams and ewes, all arranged in pairs. Thus the room constituted a sort of secular altar to the idea of heterosexual coupling, and Helle felt more fraudulent than ever.

  “Well, Henning,” Daisy said, once each of the sailors had kissed her goodbye and let in a little pie-shaped slice of sunlight on his way out the door, “Kayo tells me you’re a musician.” She held up a porcelain pot painted with lilies-of-the-valley, a cut-glass dish. Some coffee? Some of her own homemade currant preserves? Ah, it had been too many years since she’d heard the sound of piano music in the house! Poor Lennart had been the one who played, and he’d drowned in 1884, the same year Christiansborg Palace burned to the ground. The sad history of the Danes, Daisy said, a sad history of loss and deception: Hother’s unsavory dealings with the innocent forest maidens; the tragic marriage of Caroline Mathilde to a king she’d never seen; the rotten Swedes. Meanwhile, Helle leaned back in her chair, crossing her legs at the ankles, as she’d noticed men did. When she said that the coffee was very good, Daisy shrugged. Any woman who’s used to stirring up the male libido can easily tell when it isn’t there; if nothing else, she can recognize its absence by her own mounting sense of boredom. Daisy yawned and began brushing bread crumbs into a small pile, then stood and adjusted her corset, something she would never have done had Dancer still been sitting at the table. It was horrible, wasn’t it, Daisy complained, the way the bones dug into you? Of course Henning wouldn’t know.

  SO HELLE FOUND a home and, with it, a way of earning her keep. During the years she lived at number 22 Nyhavn—from 1914 to 1923, when Daisy sold the house and moved to Mariager—Helle managed to assemble a small band of piano students, mostly unwilling girls who arrived late in the afternoon to display on the yellowed keyboard of Daisy’s upright the results of their halfhearted practice. As a matter of fact, only one of her students showed any talent, a big-eared and solemn little boy named Palle. For a while after his family left Denmark he stayed in touch, writing Helle letters from Lübeck, in northern Germany, where his father had gone to work in a shipyard. Two world wars, the first of which was about to begin, bracketed Helle’s years in Copenhagen: the face of Europe—and with it the lives of millions of people—was about to change forever.

  Although Denmark remained neutral in the Great War, that position is never passive. It was Sam who explained this to me some time during the middle period of our affair, provoked no doubt by my own apparent passivity. Evidently, the famous neutrality of the Swiss was initially accomplished by their invention in the Middle Ages of the pike, a long-handled spear with a hook on the end, the perfect weapon with which to dismount and disembowel armored horsemen. Once you had the perfect weapon, you became immune to attack. Or, as Hobbes put it, equality in nature was based on the premise that all members of a given system possess in equal measure the ability to kill. You might say, Sam explained bitterly, that the so-called success of the nuclear family was predicated on such a philosophy, just as you might recognize hints of it in the notion that world peace might be secured by causing the instruments of death to lurk expectantly in holes underground. Of course Sam didn’t mean to suggest that the men who ran the world ever read Hobbes. But ideas, like germs, were always loose in the wind. Even a moron could catch the f
lu.

  And neutrality didn’t mean that the Danes weren’t affected by the upheaval around them. Oswald Bingger, for example—the teacher at the conservatory who, for good or ill, asserted the greatest influence over Helle—was continually subjected to paranoid wartime speculation only because he was born in Schleswig-Holstein, that wedge of land at the base of the Jutland peninsula over which Denmark and Germany had fought for years, tugging it this way and that like the two mothers in the Bible. According to Hr. Bingger, Lord Palmerston, the unsuccessful champion of the Danish cause in 1864, had claimed that only three men ever understood the history of Schleswig-Holstein: Prince Albert, who was dead; a professor, who went insane; and Palmerston himself, who’d eventually forgotten everything he’d ever known on the subject.

  Indeed, Hr. Bingger said, the history of Schleswig-Holstein was not unlike the plot of an opera. He disliked opera, and during the four years he worked with Helle he tried in his own dismissive fashion to win her over to his point of view. Who could remember all the details of such complicated stories? Who in their right mind would want to? People jumping in and out of closets, stabbing each other, yodeling? The only reason anyone bothered to listen to the things, Bingger insisted, was because of the occasional beauty of the music. In the same way you might understand the history of Schleswig-Holstein. The melodic structure was contrapuntal: Germany’s melody aggressive and highly emotional, Denmark’s passive and rational. What people responded to was the endless struggle of two melodies toward resolution. Bingger encouraged Helle to study Bach’s organ chorales, to recognize the way in which the architecture of the whole was made to supersede the beauty of the individual detail. You could choose to swim, forever, in the primeval soup, or you could ally yourself with the forces of reason. At any rate, that Bingger’s motives ever came into question, that he was taken for a subversive element or spy, was merely a sign of the times. So what if, as one of Helle’s fellow students took pleasure in pointing out, Bingger used the same curling device as that used by the Kaiser to make his mustaches turn up in points? So what if Bach was the Kaiser’s favorite composer?