The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Helle began to walk north on the Gothersgade, more or less in the direction of the Round Tower. On all sides she was surrounded by the subtly altered shapes of trees and statues and hedges and ironwork fences; because she hadn’t watched the snow as it fell, it seemed that these alterations were the result of a widespread internal disturbance, as if each object in the city had at last chosen to extrude the white, thick element of its inherent composition. When she got to the Krystalgade, she turned west. She could barely recognize the two bronze cherubim who customarily sat on their dark pedestal in front of St. Petri’s Church. Here and there, on the crowns of their heads or on the crests of their wings, the familiar greenish metal showed through. Otherwise, the features by which she’d come to know them—the one with a slim cocked knee and an expression of friendly cunning, the other with the hedonist’s plump belly and an expression of awakening appetite—had vanished. And then, turning the corner toward Vestergade, she bumped up against the trunk of a small elder tree, jarring loose the lintel of snow that rested across its clipped upper branches.

  The snow fell through the strange blue air in a shower of glittering star-shaped flakes. Helle blinked, and for a moment the whole world sprang into unnatural focus; as it did, she felt a finger idly running along the keys of her spine and she saw a wooden mouth in the bark of the elder tree crack open, releasing a single note. This didn’t surprise her. After all, hadn’t it been at the foot of an elder tree where the student Anselmus first heard the voices of his three little green snakes? And hadn’t it been with tisanes made from elder flowers that Ida used to coax her to sleep? So what if Inger insisted that babies laid in cradles made of elderwood would be pinched black and blue by demons? The elder tree’s mouth closed, but the note hung in the air for an instant, and then a column of notes arranged themselves under it, creating a chord consisting of six fourths: the mystic chord invented by Scriabin, that old anchorite who was said to have repudiated the pleasures of the flesh only to die from a pimple. As much as Helle hated to admit it, she realized that Hr. Bingger was right. Trying to compose a piece of music that would somehow duplicate the vastness and complexity of the sea was a mistake. For while the sea was not without form, its form was too large to comprehend, which accounted for the pervasive and obstructive sentimentality of all of her attempts. You found yourself wondering whether the sea regretted its tendency to reduce all living things to flotsam, whether the terrible, heartless sea wasn’t capable, finally, of compassion.

  IT WOULD TAKE Helle five years to complete The Harrowing of Lahloo. She was forced to work on it at night—not unlike her method for The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf—because she couldn’t risk working during the day without alerting Bingger’s suspicions. During the day, she was perceived to be an obedient drudge, drawing forth from her piano endless permutations of counterpoint. Kerman distinguishes between the architectural form of the fugue and the dramatic form of the sonata; he claims it’s the latter which informs Mozart’s inspired use of ensemble singing in such operas as Don Giovanni or Le nozze di Figaro. “I knew those scores by heart,” Helle told me, “every grace note, every rest, every anacrusis. And I knew that everything I needed to know was right there in the music.” Mozart’s music, she said, contained all the information necessary to understanding how Donna Elvira’s actions are erotically motivated, and how the tendency to put one’s faith in Eros can be confused with a capacity to forgive. At the beginning of the second act, when Donna Elvira allows herself to be seduced by Leporello masquerading as the Don, it’s not because she can’t tell the difference between the Don and his cloak, but that she can’t distinguish between her own nobility of character and her lust; and this is disclosed not in what she says but in the great music of the ensuing trio.

  So Helle realized that the music she needed to create for her decadent sea captain and her singing figurehead—the eponymous Harrow and Lahloo, respectively—had to be similarly complex, or the opera would be nothing more than an extended exercise in counterpoint, something like the boring fugue in A minor which she was engaged, by day, in composing. You had to believe in God to compose such music, which asserted the existence of a basic pattern in the universe. By night—oh, that was different! By night Helle entertained the devil.

  In her practice room the only actual, living company she had was a rat. First the black dot of the rat’s nose would appear, sticking out of a hole in the baseboard. The stiffly whiskered nose would twitch from left to right on the seemingly boneless hinge of the muzzle; then the whole head would emerge. The eyes were small and pinkish, not without intelligence. You can train a rat, as Helle discovered, to take a piece of cheese right out of your hand. You can tame any basically opportunistic creature, so long as you maintain some advantage, so long as you yourself cannot be seen as food. This was Daisy’s strategy with the suitors. And in the opening trio of The Harrowing of Lahloo, it was the strategy which defined Captain Harry Tuck’s relationship to his body servant, a young Chinese boy whom he nicknamed Rattail because of the long, black queue which grew out of the back of the boy’s otherwise bald head; it was also the strategy which defined, in that opening trio, Lahloo’s relationship to Harry.

  Helle’s plan was that in production the stage itself would be built out to suggest the prow of a ship sailing directly toward the audience, and that, for the duration of the opera, the body of the soprano singing the part of Lahloo would be strapped to that structure, duplicating the placement of a figurehead. Singing from such a position would be difficult, but Helle figured that if the angle of the prow was sufficiently oblique, the singer’s diaphragm would remain unobstructed. A diva desires, above all, the undivided attention of her audience. She desires prominence. Thus, even before the curtain was to come up at the start of the first act, even while the orchestra was busy exploring the several keys implicit in the mystic chord, with which the overture begins, Lahloo would be visible. Indeed, she would be audible as well, since Helle decided to include her voice as part of the overture, an endlessly repeating series of melismatic, or wordless, triads, in each case taking for the tonic one of the six notes of the opening chord. The effect of this was eerie, liquid, restless; each time you thought that you understood the size and shape of your surroundings, a small hole opened and you found yourself swimming through it.

  A bog, like an opera, is a self-contained environment. A bog is not, contrary to popular opinion, similar to a great sponge, drawing in quantities of water which it then lets seep out into the landscape around it during periods of dryness or drought. There is nothing generous about a bog, nothing receptive; the mosses which grow in bogs reproduce grudgingly, sometimes not putting forth so much as a single spore in hundreds of years. Only the surface mat is alive, and underneath the living heads of the plants you will find a tangle of dead, translucent matter. In the same way an opera constitutes a world sufficient unto itself. Generally, all of the component parts of that world have been assembled within the first act. New characters might appear later, new plot twists, but the fundamental laws, by which you will understand the opera’s outcome, never change. You are not left wondering at the end what will happen next. Nothing will happen next. The dead are thus accorded a form of immortality, the immortality of stasis. The Don may tumble into the fires of hell, but his spirit persists. “Ahhh!” he howls, and this time, we know, the consummate escape artist will discover no new walls to jump over, no new doors to slip through. All that he has succeeded in eluding is the watchful eye of the audience. If you want something to last forever, throw it into a bog, put it into an opera.

  Conversely, if you want something to assert its capacity for change—if you want to remind something of its mortality—put it out to sea. Life on a ship, particularly on an opium clipper sailing the coast of China, was, Helle knew, subject to daily reversal, beginning with the weather. A pale, cloudless sky, an absence of wind, and you found yourself caught in the doldrums. The surface of the sea would be perfectly smooth, stretched taut over the encircl
ing rim of the horizon; powerless to move, you would become easy prey for the pirates in their lorchas. Or the barometer might suddenly drop, the wind begin screaming, and before you could shorten the sails they might blow apart into hundreds of small pieces, which, only minutes later, would fly through the air above Swatow, or Hainan, where they’d be taken for a flight of birds. If a typhoon didn’t threaten to capsize your ship, then a war junk might. The importation of opium into China had been decreed illegal, as the mandarins understood all too well the dangerous influence of the drug. Thus you usually delivered your cargo under cover of night; but still, if the moon was up, you might see anything: a man with a foot-long fingernail testing the quality of a dark cake of Patna opium, or a man with no fingers at all lifting a fallen globe of yellowish Benares with his toes. A chest might break open, releasing a spill of silver Mexican dollars. This was the accepted method of payment, but sometimes the exchange was more exotic: golden and impassive figures of deities would change hands; a bolt of silk would suddenly unreel and fall shimmering into the sea. Meanwhile, if you paid close attention, you could hear the constant lapping of small waves against your ship.

  It was that sound, so brainless and persistent, which Helle was trying to capture in the overture. At first she thought it might be achieved through the strings’ simultaneous use of two different bowing techniques: ondulé, an obsolete form of tremolo, in which several notes are taken in the same bow; and spiccato, in which the bow is caused to bounce slightly from the string. But in either case the results were too jumpy, too fragmented. The sea didn’t waste its time with simple rearrangement of your existing parts. The sea took from you—sometimes pieces, sometimes everything. Which was why, Dancer once explained to Helle, sailors on long voyages carved into walrus tusks geometric patterns, flowers and trees, ships under full sail. Carving scrimshaw, Dancer said, had nothing to do with boredom; what the act really implied was ownership.

  My guess is that this conversation occurred not long after Helle’s mysterious experience at the foot of the elder tree. In any event it was still the winter of 1915, around three in the morning (ulvetimen again), when Dancer stumbled into the dark parlor, where he found Helle sitting alone in the dark on Daisy’s favorite sofa. “Misery loves company,” he said, pulling off his boots and collapsing backwards onto the green brocade cushions, as they’d all been instructed not to. He was in a bad mood, and shook his head fiercely when Helle asked him what the problem was, squinting shut his eyelids edged with pale golden lashes. He didn’t want to talk about the bitch, he said. He’d rather talk about something else. Henning, for example. What the hell was Henning doing up so late?

  Even though he kept his eyes closed, Helle could tell Dancer was listening carefully to every word she said. Meanwhile, as she proceeded to describe her failed attempts at composition, she found herself memorizing the way he held his head back and to one side, disdainful and slightly suspicious, even in repose. Harry Tuck, she thought. Those curls like the sprung workings of a pocket watch! That primitive slit of a mouth! The more Dancer became an object of her imagination, the less capable he seemed of independent action, so Helle was startled when he actually began to speak. He began by making the previously mentioned point about scrimshaw and ownership, after which he held his arm out in front of Helle’s face, revealing first a blue-black plume of dragon’s breath on the palm of his hand, then pulling back his sweater sleeve little by little to reveal the dragon’s wide-open green jaws and bulging red eyes on his wrist, the red wings tautly spread on umbrellalike spokes across his forearm, the thick green length of tail disappearing under his now-bunched sleeve. Didn’t anybody realize, he asked, that this was why he’d turned his own body into an artifact? He didn’t want any bitch getting ideas, least of all Aegir’s wife, Ran, who with her nine daughters (She Who Glitters; the Translucent One Who Mirrors the Heavens; She Who Pitches or Dips; She Whose Hair Is Red in the Evening Sun; She Who Is Coal Black; the Bloody-Haired One; etc.) had jurisdiction over the lives of seafaring men such as himself. What Helle needed, he said, was a tattoo. Of course he didn’t call her “Helle,” although when he finally opened his eyes it was obvious to her that Dancer knew he was looking at a woman. On the breast, he said, smiling. Maybe on the ass.

  The same old story, Helle complained. No matter how hard you tried to keep your sexuality hidden, you were always susceptible to exposure and, consequently, punishment or ridicule. The early Christian saints, the ones who devoted their lives to chastity, found this out the hard way. There was St. Paul the Hermit, who so annoyed the Emperor Decius with his claims of asceticism that the emperor caused him to be tied down while a harlot caressed his naked body. When the saint felt his penis stiffening, he is said to have bit off his own tongue, having no other weapon at his disposal, and spit it at the harlot’s face. Generally, Helle pointed out, these stories were about men. Rather than be tempted themselves by the pleasures of the flesh, women were supposed to play the temptress. Or the Virgin: in the case of Pope Leo, who cut off his hand after a female supplicant kissed him there and consequently aroused him, it was the Virgin who caused a new hand to grow in its place. No one would dream of trying to tempt the Virgin. What would you use? Certainly not the caresses of a harlot. If you want to get the better of the Virgin, you have to marry her; you have to assert the male forces of reason over the female tyranny of chaos.

  Which, according to Helie, was why our culture would permit a man to change himself into a woman and not the other way around. This had nothing to do with physiology, although the fact that it’s easier to take something away from a body than to add something to it undoubtedly simplified the task. Whatever you started out as, Helle claimed, determined your essential nature. Men didn’t want to have to entertain the possibility of spending the night in a hunting cabin with someone who was, in the deepest reaches of his soul, a woman. Whereas a woman who had at one time been a man—at least you might be able to reason with her. The worst abuse Odin could heap upon Loki was to remind him that in the dawn of time he’d lived eight winters underground as a milkmaid.

  But Helle wasn’t thinking of Loki, or of the Virgin, or of twice-blessed Pope Leo on that dark winter night in Daisy’s parlor when she found herself being kissed by Dancer. His mouth was surprisingly soft; his touch, where his hands cupped her shoulders, surprisingly gentle. He kissed her once and then fell back again into his corner of the sofa, regarding her with wary admiration. It made sense, he said, her disguise. If he were a woman, he’d probably have done the same thing. But Helle was crazy to think she could get away with it; her skin was too smooth, for one thing. The fire was dying down, and the stove’s tile walls ticked as they contracted. The walls of the stove ticked; Daisy’s clocks ticked; the room was getting smaller, colder, inching toward morning. When Helle told him that his own skin was smooth, he frowned. He knew a girl on Kunø, he said, a little girl, slim like her, and smart. In school this girl always finished her work before everyone else. When she grew up, she told them, she was going to be famous; she’d discover the cure for typhoid, diphtheria, or maybe she’d be a trapeze artist. Everyone used to laugh at her. Dancer reached over to the three-tiered end table, picked up a pair of embroidery scissors made to resemble a stork, and began to snip at the air. “A tattoo will help,” he said, “but it won’t be enough.”

  Dancer. If I shift my own position slightly I can almost feel it, that thin layer of heat surrounding his body. Oh, he was an attractive man, of that I have no doubt. And like so many attractive men, he seems to have created a vague molecular disturbance in the air around him, whereas these days I seem to be encased in a suit of bark, to be capable of disturbing nothing. Do I want him to kiss Helle again? Do I want him to kiss me? Certainly a human body is never sufficient unto itself. These days my own tongue sits in my mouth, good for nothing but forming words or opinions about the taste of food. What did Helle feel during the brief moment when Dancer’s tongue made its way into her mouth? She claimed to have been intereste
d in the sensation of an alien tongue touching her molars, but maybe she was just embarrassed to admit that she’d found the experience even remotely pleasant. “I’m going to be famous,” she told Dancer, imagining how, if you were a figurehead, the salty spray of the waves would wash continually over your face, altering your composition. Helle leaned forward so that her head rested against Dancer’s shoulder; she wondered whether under the wool of his sweater the huge barbed tip of the dragon’s tail dangled over into the basin of his clavicle.

  Over, against, under, into: the mystery was so frequently prepositional. Dancer pulled off her cap and began to remove the hairpins, one at a time, tossing them down onto the hooked rug at their feet. “Who would have guessed,” he said, running his fingers through her hair, carefully working out the tangles. He seemed to be surprised at how much of it there was; Helle could feel his fingertips against her scalp, stroking, stroking. She held her breath. Only as it happened Dancer wasn’t interested in seduction. He told Helle that the girl on Kunø had died giving birth to her third child, and that as far as he was concerned she was better off dead. Then he lifted a single long lock of hair and, with the stork’s beak, sliced it off, almost at the roots. What has four arms, four legs, two heads, and no brains? he asked. Hold still, he said. And so Helle did, sitting absolutely still as Dancer proceeded to cut away the rest of her hair; he cut it very short, like a convict’s. Once he was finished, he threw down the scissors—moonlight shone in the metal—and within its nest of hair the stork’s beak was wide open. The next day they went to the tattooist.