The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  I put everything back into the carton, folded shut the flaps, and returned it to where I’d found it. My dull life, I thought, would continue; I would continue to boil macaroni, to pair socks, to scoop tips from the crumb-laden tabletops in the diner. The twins would be getting home from school, expecting a snack. I had no idea, then, where I was headed, no idea of how, in the end, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. Of course Helle was counting on that—that once I’d conjured her up, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from scraping away at her fiendish garments, weighing the residue, the minute heap of chalk dust which had been a human soul.

  AT FIRST I tried to ignore those faint, devilish stirrings, the early stages of possession. An image would come to me and I’d ignore it: Helle Ten Brix in the guise of a skinny dark-haired girl, regarding me with a familiar combination of impatience and fervor, her eyes darting this way and that. Go away, I’d say, and she would, but not before she’d left behind a little hole, a gap which, until I acknowledged its presence—until I finally began to figure out how to fill it in, sifting through the papers in the carton, through remembered conversations, through the trailer’s scant furnishings—deeply disturbed my peace of mind. Little by little it became clear that an entire landscape was taking shape. The girl wasn’t alone; she was squirming to get free from a young woman’s grip, from the grip of her mother, pretty Ida Johansdatter, and the two of them were poised in their green rubber boots near the lagg of what had to be the Great Bog at Horns. This would have been in late May or early June. The first spring flowers, crowfoot and sundew, would have been starting to open, the first baby tortoises starting to poke from their eggs. Understand, I did my research. I learned, for instance, that the sundew is carnivorous, that its complex digestive system is capable of turning the body of a fly into a spray of white, starry blossoms. Sialis flavilatera into Drosera rotundifolia. Something ugly into something beautiful—a sentimental metaphor, as Helle would have been the first to point out.

  Eventually, though, I could actually hear it, that voice of hers, the deep, hoarse voice of a chain smoker, stirring through my living room like fog through a valley. A reliance on fact or on figurative language will get you nowhere, Frances, I would hear her saying. What about the child’s runny nose, the mother’s unreliable heart? It begins where it ends, to paraphrase Machaut: when I was a child in Jutland, back in the days when I was still as tender and innocently deceitful as your little girls, my mother used to take me by the hand and lead me into the bog. If you can’t understand that, you might as well give up and head straight for the bus terminal. Go ahead, open the locker. You’ve got the key.

  Luckily, I’d read enough fairy tales to the twins to know what happened if you gave in to such temptation, just as I’d read enough Freud to know where the suggestion came from. In fact, as Helle had anticipated, it wasn’t a plant or a fly that interested me; what interested me—frightened me, really—was my own quickening sense of complicity. For at some point I’d begun to feel it myself: the bog water pooling beneath the soles of those green rubber boots and then, gradually, higher and higher up, until my ankles grew cold and my feet vanished. Was the water rising, or was I sinking? Who would have dreamed water could be so black? According to Helle, if you took even one sip of that black, frigid water you’d submit to the Bog Queen’s tyranny; just one small sip and she’d turn your blood to tannin. Squish squish squish—it was impossible to avoid making noise when you walked on peat. Her sleek, eyeless head revolved in its neck socket. Who is walking up there? she wondered.

  Who indeed but a child and her mother, the mother so involved in her own thoughts that if it weren’t for the child’s unnatural attentiveness, they probably would never have made it past the first peat hag. The Danish bogs were riddled with the things—big seeping holes left by the men who cut peat, dangerous pools where the storks waded on their long orange legs, hunting for frogs, where even in early spring you could see chunks of dirty ice clinging to the waterlily roots. You had to be careful walking through a bog. The Bog Queen’s daughters—Retaliation, Grudge, and Unnameable—were waiting for you to make one false move. One false move and you were done for. At least this was what Ida had told Helle before they set out. The Bog Queen’s daughters, she’d said, were the reason why we had shoemakers. Hadn’t Helle noticed how shoemakers were always men? Men were always busy figuring out ways to protect themselves. The only problem was, shoes wouldn’t do you any good in a bog. And if you worried about your shoes, like the girl in the famous story, then you’d sink. Down down down. You’d do something stupid, something that would catch their attention, like making a stepping stone out of the loaf of bread which was supposed to be a gift for your lonely old mother, just to protect your shoes. And then Retaliation would strike you dumb, and Grudge would turn your skin to salt, and Unnameable would wind your soul right out of you on a tiny wooden spindle.

  Later Helle explained to me that what Ida had actually been talking about were the Furies, whom she’d transposed from their birthplace in the Aegean to cold, flat Denmark. As I understand it, the only comparable threesome in Denmark is an indifferent lot called the Norns; to generate anything so horrible as the Furies would have required a more fiery cauldron than the North could provide. In any event, Ida’s reasons for doing this remain unclear. Was she trying to instill in her daughter that love of hyperbole essential to the operatic vision—or just trying to frighten the child? And why was it that the farther they got from their house, the closer to the bog’s humped center, the more reckless Ida became, as if to deny the existence of the dangers she’d been describing only an hour earlier? Because she certainly wasn’t watching where she put her own feet, plunging ahead without regard for the obvious peculiarities of the landscape, pausing only when she got sucked to the knee into one of the fissures between the hummocks, or when the hem of her coat got snagged on a leatherleaf bush. But Ida, as Helle explained it to me, had a talent for dressing up her own thwarted impulses so they would come out looking like advice; most unhappy people, Helle said, were good at dressing things up. Perhaps this was why on their first visit to the bog every spring her mother insisted on bringing a handful of cotton grass back to the house with her—seven or eight thin, perfectly straight stems, surmounted by what looked like clumps of mouse fur. Ida would take the cotton grass home and arrange it in a vase of sea-green glass, which she would then set on the closed lid of her Pleyel baby grand. But not before putting down an embroidered doily first: a fine piano’s wood is unbelievably susceptible to defacement, and the lightest touch of a finger leaves a print that can never be removed.

  THE STORY Ida was referring to is, of course, “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf.” Originally a folksong, “Pigen, der trådte på brødet,” it chronicles the horrible fate of a vain young woman from the town of Sibbo, in Pomerania, whose punishment for loving a pair of shoes more than a loaf of bread is to be “frozen like a boulder” before she’s swallowed up in a mud puddle. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the song was published as a broadside, and despite its heavyhanded morality and plodding rhymes (“O human soul keep this in mind, / Abandon pride’s temptation, / And leave all other sins behind, / They were her ruination …”) it’s remembered for having inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the same name.

  In Andersen’s version, a poor young girl named Inger is sent out to service in the country, where, after successfully charming her rich mistress, she’s treated like a member of the family, dressed in beautiful clothes and, eventually, urged to return home for a visit. Andersen has already told us that Inger’s disposition was “bad from the beginning.” With his customary fondness for perverse behavior he’s detailed Inger’s childhood habit of pulling the wings from flies and impaling beetles on pins; with his flair for the melodramatic he’s allowed Inger’s mother to predict that one day her daughter will trample on her heart. Which, Andersen goes on to tell us, she does “with a vengeance.” Inger’s mistress sends her off with two presents: a new pair
of shoes for herself and a large loaf of bread for her parents. Naturally, when the path she’s following leads through a bog, Inger decides to step on the loaf rather than risk ruining her shoes.

  Up to this point Andersen has more or less conformed to the narrative line of the song. But even though both girls find themselves transformed for their wickedness into statues, the girl in the song remains above ground, where everyone can see her, while Inger sinks to the bottom of the bog, where she becomes a decorative element in the devil’s courtyard. How gruesome and exotic the plight of the damned! Although Inger is ravenous, she can’t move a muscle to break off so much as a tiny piece of the loaf to which she’s welded; although flies—the very flies she mutilated years earlier—creep all over her face, she can’t raise a finger to brush them away. Her whole body is fixed in place, with the exception of her eyes—and this proves to be a dubious advantage, since the only way her eyes will turn is backwards, revealing the ugly thoughts peeking out at her from between the folds of her brain.

  Years go by. Inger discovers that she’s able to hear everything people say about her, none of it good. Her mother, her mistress, the cowherd who watched her sink out of sight—the effect of their judgment is to make her hard heart harder still. She hears songs about her arrogance, stories describing her vanity. Her own mother’s dying words are “What a grief you’ve been to me.” And then, amazingly, another dying woman, a stranger, weeps at the door of heaven for Inger’s soul. When her tears filter down through all those layers of peat, the girl’s stony carapace dissolves and a little bird is released to fly into the upper world.

  At first the bird is without voice and ashamed to be seen, so it hides in a chink in a wall. Winter comes, the ponds freeze over, food is scarce—when the bird finally emerges, it is to seek out those random morsels of bread left in the baiting places or fallen in the tracks of sledges. Motivated more by sympathy than by hunger, the bird eats only a single crumb of whatever it finds and gives away the rest, until, at last, what it has given away equals the weight of the original loaf which Inger tossed so thoughtlessly, so many years ago, into the bog. The bird’s dull gray wings turn white; children watch it as it flies across the sea, its body gleaming, right into the sun.

  Literary critics—“to a man,” as Helle was fond of saying—tend to find Andersen’s punishment excessive, given the nature of Inger’s crime. Puzzled, they resort to Freudian analysis. The shoe, they suggest, stands for the uterus; Inger’s pride in her shoes, for her awakening sexuality. Naturally Andersen—his fear of sex legendary, his famous passion for Jenny Lind fueled as much by the purity of her moral conduct as by the purity of her voice—would have wanted to banish the uterus to hell, where it belonged.

  However, in Helle Ten Brix’s operatic version, likewise entitled The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Inger is no sinner but a heroine, her apparent arrogance a measure of her strength, her sojourn underground a stage of apprenticeship to that feminist ideal represented by the Bog Queen. In the opera, Inger’s shoes become, quite literally, the vehicles of her enlightenment. It makes perfect sense that Helle’s Inger, bent on protecting her shoes, would decide to step on what might otherwise have come to serve as a symbol of her oppression; just as it follows that, bent on uncovering the enemy’s identity, she would have shown an early interest in dissection. God is now the enemy, and the Bog Queen, together with her furious daughters, the inevitable worms in the rose of creation. Without them God’s mindless replication of his own heart might have gone on forever and ever: “A crystal hive,” as Inger sings, “that organ which is the world analogous to man’s imagining.”

  HELLE TEN BRIX, impossible, beloved Helle, where are you now? If I were to return to the little bog you took me to one day, in that place where the Branch Road turns to a muddy trail before disappearing entirely in a thicket of cedar trunks, if I were to peer in among the deeply puckered, pale green leaves of the Solomon’s seal would I see, instead of the expected single drop of water, one of your gray, furious eyes staring back at me? Because I know you went somewhere; I was there when you died, I saw you go. No, no, ch’io non mi pento, you said, grabbing my hand. I could hear Marco pausing outside the door to wind his watch, as if to generate an endless stream of minutes, hours, days; as if to imply that you still had all the time in the world. All the time in the world! What could he have been thinking of? Tick tick tick—only a week earlier you’d told us how the air was filling up with ticking black particles, which was why you had to wear earphones in order to listen to Don Giovanni. Only at night, after Marco had gone home and everyone else was asleep, were you able to continue work on your own opera. Don Giovanni and The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf—two works which have little in common beyond the fact that their protagonists sink into hell. Of course in the former case it’s the fiery pit of Christian iconography; in the latter, the cold pit of a bog.

  Is that where you’re stuck forever—in a cold, moist cauldron of peat, consigned to an eternity of tea parties with the Bog Queen and her bad-tempered daughters? Maybe you were wrong. Maybe there actually is a heaven, and up there your musical skills have won you so much praise from the angels that you’ve forgotten whatever passion it was that shaped you. I hope not. Just as I hope that if you’re watching me now, either up through a hole in the peat, or down through a gap in the clouds, you’d be happy to know the extent to which I am finally yours and yours alone.

  II

  BUT JUST WHAT did I mean when I said I was haunted? How tempting to insist that all I meant was what intelligent and sophisticated people usually mean when they say that something haunts them. That Helle Ten Brix had got, so to speak, under my skin; that after she was dead I couldn’t forget her. A haunting melody. A haunting smile. Besides, who believes in ghosts these days? The ignorant and the superstitious, the religious fanatic, the recently bereaved? It used to be that children believed in ghosts, but modern children are too smart to be taken in by such nonsense; they’ve watched enough television, seen enough movies, to know there’s nothing more to this world than what meets the eye. The eye, that coolest of organs, opaque and calculating. Who needs a window to the soul when it’s generally agreed that souls don’t exist?

  And what about me, Frances Thorn, a modern woman, a well-born and well-educated woman who once upon a time decided to discard conventional comforts—a woman who prided herself on being a true descendant of Diogenes (although I admit I never went so far as to live in a tub)? What happens to my credibility if I confess that one morning in June as I was standing naked on the bath mat—a mild airy morning, not two months after Helle’s death—I felt the beads of sunlight with which the room was spattered condense suddenly into a vibrantly humming chord, and that when I reached for the towel I felt that chord drive straight through me, from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head, as if to provide despair with an axis? The dominant seventh, just on the verge of resolving itself in the music of pure inspiration—that immaculate sound Mozart achieved during the last year of his life: the music of Die Zauberflöte, which, according to George Bernard Shaw, was the only music fit for the mouth of God. I could hear birds singing outside the window, the drip-drip-drip of water from the shower head, the early-morning chatter of the twins. In other words, my ears remained tuned to the sounds of this world; it wasn’t that I heard the chord but that I was inhabited by it.

  An unpleasant sensation, the struggle toward resolution manifested itself as a persistent faint shiver, like a piano string lacking an overdamper. Like Helle, inhabited by the sound of Lahloo’s voice that night on the Gothersgade. Typical, I thought. Even the Muse, when she came to me, came to me secondhand and in a bathroom: around my body the rough wet towel; under my feet the tonguelike loops of the bath mat; on the windowsill, behind the shampoo bottles pasted over with wet dust and hair, the clear plastic box in which I’d once hidden Sam’s ring among aquamarine bubble-bath capsules and which was now filled with grayish slivers of soap. How warm the air was, coming in through the screen, but
it made no difference. The shivering wouldn’t stop, and I found myself remembering another time when I’d felt this way, though the sensation then had been more subtle, a piano string again, only a string fastened off-kilter to a cracked bridge. Then, too, it had been a warm morning in early summer, Helle and I sitting on the stream bank behind the trailer, our bare feet in the water. She’d come tapping at my window just after dawn, complaining that she’d tossed and turned all night. Tiny specks of sun peppered the water, winked on and off like fireflies within the dark cedar woods and, there at my side, I could see the two unwinking specks of light which floated wetly across the dark surface of Helle’s eyes. In such cases the string loses its ability to “know” how long it is. It wavers, refuses to hold a note. How alike we were, Helle was saying. Look at us! A pair of rail-thin women, smoking like chimneys—who would guess, to look at us, that the music of the spheres played in our heads?

  “Well, in one of our heads,” I said.

  She snorted. “You can’t fool me, Frances.” Why else, in a house otherwise furnished with junk, would I maintain a 1907 Steinway upright? And pay Cyril Beemis a small fortune to come all the way from Utica twice a year to keep it tuned? Oh, we were the same, all right. It was only men who found this idea frightening, only a man who couldn’t tolerate the idea that somewhere in this world there might be another man identical to himself. When you got right down to it, wasn’t that why they kept plying the doppelgänger, that tired old theme, in their art? Whereas women weren’t afraid of similarity. Till death do us part, Helle pronounced, delicately stifling a cough, shifting her position on the uncomfortably root-latticed bank so our legs touched along the thighs and our pale white feet swam up against each other in the cool brown water. Frances! Maybe not even death would be sufficient to part two such kindred spirits.