The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Page 20

  “If anything,” Helle told me, “I’d gotten skinnier since leaving home. Skinnier and sharper.” A gaunt young man with cropped hair and circles under his eyes—Helle had removed his soul in order to animate the more worthy receptacle of her opera. You could recognize the soulless by their precision of movement, she said, a precision devoid of grace, similar to the relentless ticking of a clock. Time moved along its lateral track and the soulless moved with it, which explained why she was, if nothing else, good at keeping appointments. For instance, she arrived at the dressmaker’s at precisely three o’clock on a May afternoon, although there was no sign of Inger when she got there. A sloe-eyed woman with pins in her mouth and a measuring tape around her neck deposited her on a sofa, pointed briskly at a sign which forbade the smoking of pipes or cigars, and disappeared into a curtained alcove. Even though it was a warm day, the shop’s windows were closed, and the air in the room was filled with the dust of cut fabric. Murmurs, the sound of pins falling into a ceramic dish—a hand reached out through the curtain, drawing it back, and out came Inger.

  She’d put on weight—probably as much as Helle had lost—but otherwise her cheeks were still pink, her hair still golden and shining, her skin clear and white. Nor had she managed to achieve an air of sophistication, despite the sky-blue, tailored day suit she was wearing, hobble-skirted and lightly corseted; as Inger walked across the thickly carpeted floor, the dressmaker warned her to take smaller steps or she’d tear the seams. She twirled, towering over Helle in her new high-heeled shoes, her lofty new hairdo: a towering woman preparing to wed the towering Hans, tall and round and stolid as a tower. “But really,” said the dressmaker, “your young man must leave now.” It was time for Inger to try on the wedding gown, and it was bad luck for the groom to see the gown before the wedding. She affected a French accent, Helle said, but anyone could tell that the dressmaker was from Funen, “the Garden of Denmark,” and that her parents were barley farmers.

  Springtime, Helle thought. The linden tree outside her bedroom window at Daisy’s was dying; this spring all it had put forth was a single green glove, on the hand that tapped against the panes. “Oh,” Inger said, “but this isn’t my young man.” You could listen to the tapping all night long; you could think you were being summoned. The language of the Muse is similarly misleading. Oh, the Muse says, but I wasn’t calling you.

  VI

  IT SHOULD COME as no surprise that Helle never went to Inger’s wedding, or that the present she sent in her stead was deliberately impersonal, a large basket of fruit. When you finished eating the fruit, you could put your mending in the basket or take it on picnics; you could use it as a Moses basket for a newborn baby, if you happened to have one. A practical present, even if the fruit was rotten by the time it was delivered.

  Besides, as it turned out, it made no difference whether Helle had planned to attend the wedding or not, for on the last day of May, 1916—probably some time during the rehearsal dinner—the British light cruiser Galatea opened fire on a Danish merchantman, thus starting what came to be called the Battle of Jutland, and in the ensuing confusion Kayo was killed. They never found out exactly how. Perhaps the merchantman had been, in reality, a Q-ship, an innocent-looking vessel fitted out with hidden armaments, or perhaps it had been mistaken for one. When an enemy U-boat surfaced, a “panic party”—a group of men dressed like merchant sailors, occasionally carrying with them a live parrot in a cage—would set forth from the Q-ship in a life raft, while the gun crews remained behind, preparing to strike with their rifles, their twelve-pounders, their Maxims.

  According to Dancer, when Kayo had shipped out it had been for Vaasa, on the Finnish coast; he should have been in the Gulf of Bothnia, not in the North Sea. Dancer blamed Jellicoe, who continued to resist the notion of providing merchantmen with protective convoys. Everyone knew that the British commander-in-chief was a fool, a hypochondriac more interested in charting his own body’s losses (of teeth, in particular, to pyorrhea) than the daily casualties of innocent lives. Meanwhile, Daisy persisted in her belief that Kayo was a hero, that he had, unbeknownst to the rest of them, taken up the cause of freedom. She hung the parlor with black baize, and propped up a small, framed photograph—Kayo on the deck of a ship, squinting into the sunlight, his cap pulled down low on his forehead—in the front window, between the polar bear and the ivy heart.

  In those days, despite such technical advances as wireless telegraphy, hydraulic power systems, and long-range search-lights, naval warfare remained, essentially, a mysterious business. In the case of the Battle of Jutland, neither side had any idea that the other’s main battle fleet was even at sea. Admiral Scheer hadn’t been able to do his customary air reconnaissance, because the wind was too strong for the Zeppelins to be moved from their sheds. The weather was bad everywhere, windy and foggy and wet. Inger wrote to tell Helle that they’d been forced to hold the wedding reception inside her uncle’s house. Rain on a wedding day was good luck, she insisted.

  Only isn’t it true that good luck is always parochial—that while Hans Fog was shoving a piece of wedding cake into his new bride’s mouth, Kayo was lying dead on the ocean floor; that while Inger was slipping into bed beside her new husband, Helle was standing alone at the edge of the harbor, cursing God? Kai Borge. How could he be dead? Born on February 7, 1897—making him almost exactly six months older than she was—in the town of Rappendam, the parish of Jorlunde, beloved son of Aksel and Hanna Borge. Kayo, whose kindness Helle had come to take for granted. But doesn’t recognition always come after someone dies? Or, at least, adult recognition: when Helle was a girl, it never occurred to her to think that she’d taken Ida for granted. Death had nothing to do with time—it was a location, a place where Ida had gone. At first Helle patiently waited for her to come back, until she was eventually forced to give up, preparing for the more adult confusions about death we think of as facing reality. Of course, later I would learn that death is a place, and that it’s inside us, waiting for each of us to come to it. It’s like one of those problems in non-Euclidean geometry wherein a shape proves capable of sailing through a tiny hole in itself, its points rearranging themselves in a previously uncharted neighborhood that was there all along.

  The funeral was held in the church Kayo had attended as a boy; the Borge family had its own pew, and it was here that Helle eventually found herself, wedged between Dancer and Maja Borge. This was Kayo’s youngest sister, the one Helle was supposed to resemble, although obviously the resemblance Kayo had seen wasn’t physical, for Maja turned out to be tall and big-boned, with the same large head and crown of thick, kinky hair as her brother. After they sang the hymn for the drowned, the pastor, gripping the edge of the pulpit as if to prevent himself from falling out of it, delivered a barely audible eulogy. “He can’t trust himself,” Maja told Helle, explaining that the pastor had always favored Kayo and was infuriated when he’d decided to become a sailor. “Like everyone else,” Maja said, “he always thought I was a bad influence.” She pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Helle, though she was the one who was crying. Helle was never able to weep in front of other people, preferring, like God, to provide her grief with form.

  The church at Rappendam was small and white, set in the middle of its own cemetery. All around the grave markers the yellow flowers of the spring primroses would have been opening up, their delicate stems rising from within clusters of thick hairy leaves; further down near the roots, where the stalks of the leaves were veined with red, water beaded, each drop overlarge and tremulous. First there was shadow, then there was sun, then there was shadow again: the clouds were moving fast from west to east toward Rappendam fen, where in 1941 peat cutters found the broken pieces of several prehistoric wagons, tossed down among the bones of cows and horses and sheep and wild pigs. But in 1941 the world was being torn apart by another war, and Denmark hadn’t managed to escape that one.

  In 1916, however, Rappendam’s claim to renown was its two life-sized wooden figu
res of Christ, stored in a damp room off the sacristy. Maja persuaded the pastor to unlock the door after the service so Helle and Dancer could see them. Look, Maja said, had they ever seen such beautiful carving? Designed to be drawn through the town during Holy Week, one of the figures was lying down in a coffin; the other was standing up to reveal its wounds. Scholars came from all over Europe to study them, the pastor said. Originally the figures had been painted; you could still see traces of bluish white pigment in the grain of the standing Christ’s chest, rusty patches around the wounds’ lips. Each rib bone was clearly articulated, the ribcage gripping the torso as if it were the splayed fingers of a god bent on retrieval. Such detail! the pastor exclaimed. Kai was fascinated by the figures, he said, probably because they helped him believe in the miracle of heaven. “Liar,” Maja whispered in Helle’s ear; she had taken her hand and was swinging her arm back and forth, back and forth, like the tail of a cat getting ready to strike. But the pastor wasn’t a liar. All the man was guilty of was sentimentality, a crime which generally provides its own punishment.

  There are no hills to speak of in Denmark. Of course there are the chalk cliffs of the Isle of Møn, and Heaven Mountain in central Jutland, which rises a scant five hundred feet above Lake Julsø, suggesting that heaven might be a lot closer to earth than we like to think. But for the most part, Denmark is flat—flat as a board, as Helle would say, flat as a pancake. In Denmark it’s difficult to sneak away unnoticed, so when she left the church and wandered off alone down the Helsingør Road, everyone could see her go. For a while she walked aimlessly. The sky was bright blue; the clouds that had raced past earlier were probably casting their shadows on the streets of Petrograd by now, or breaking apart to fall as snow on the Mongolian tundra. Looking back, she could see the church in its moving thicket of dark-clothed mourners. Looking ahead, to the point where a smaller road intersected with the Helsingør Road, she could see another thicket, also dark, but motionless. Otherwise there was nothing in the landscape except hops fields, the vines pale green, the buds tight and shining. At sea, Kayo had told her, you couldn’t always tell whether the island looming up in front of you was really there or merely the reflected image of an island you’d already left behind. Kayo, she thought: sitting with his elbows propped on the table, inserting a spoon slowly through his open lips, surprised and pleased to find that Daisy had put raisins in the porridge. Everything in life presented itself to Kayo this way. And would he have been surprised and pleased the moment his soul jumped out of his body? Helle said his name aloud, just once, sharply, as if it might be possible to catch his soul’s attention. But all that came back to her was the sound of crying.

  At first Helle thought she was hearing the collective voice of grief, carried on a light wind from the churchyard, floating toward her across the hops fields. However, it soon became clear that the sound was growing in intensity the closer she got to the intersection, where a grove of trees, tall and blighted, marked the banks of a narrow stream. At her approach, hundreds of blue-black birds—rooks? jackdaws?—took to the air, beating their wings wildly in place, hovering and then preparing to land, their claws outstretched, their beaks open wide, screaming. They did this over and over again. The highest tree branches lolled from side to side beneath the weight of the birds’ heavy, shapeless nests. Maybe there was no difference between the sounds of grief and panic. She sat on the bank, watching how the sunlight penetrated to the stream’s sandy bottom, dotted with shining stones, dead leaves. Wing feathers fell from above, some landing in the water and drifting along in the current until they clogged in a pool of yellow foam. All around her dandelions were coming up, and the first tender shoots of that species of wild parsley the Danes call billebo, or beetlehouse. The new leaves were still curled in on themselves, and speckled with bird droppings—the people who idealized nature, according to Helle, hadn’t looked at it very closely.

  The birds’ angry squalling continued unabated, and that, combined with the rippling of the stream, made it impossible to hear anything else—the footsteps, for example, of Maja Borge as she came creeping up from behind. “Uh-oh,” Maja said. She put her fingers in her mouth and sucked on them as if they’d been burned. “The eye,” she said, “the eye,” although Helle didn’t know how she could have seen it, since it was concealed as usual beneath the high white collar of her shirt. Crazy Maja. I could have warned you, Dancer told her later, explaining that it had always been Kayo’s fondest wish that he and Maja would get married, if Helle could imagine such a thing. He didn’t know the details, only that what had originally been taken for precocity eventually emerged as craziness, and that the family had at one point sent her away to an institution, but brought her back when she refused to eat. Maja asked Helle which she preferred, air or water, then told her that the Buddha also had a third eye, though his was in the middle of his forehead. She sat down, removed her boots, peeled off her black stockings, lifted her black skirts, and waded out into the stream. Kayo, she said, used to bring her here when she was little. The wings of her nostrils were red; otherwise she appeared placid, even light, as if, having spent her sorrow, she was now completely empty.

  Laughing, holding her hand to her mouth like a naughty child, Maja asked if Helle wanted to talk to Kayo. Most people wouldn’t understand, she said, but she knew from what he’d told her in his letters that Helle was different. They used to practice, she said, right here. It was a good spot on account of the birds, who kept the air stirred up so that things could move around without any trouble. And suddenly the sound of the birds got louder and louder, their feathers showering down faster and faster through the branches together with gobbets of light and excrement; Maja’s eyes rolled up into their sockets until only the whites were visible, and she fell backwards into the stream, lengthwise, like a tree. As she lay there, hands folded across her chest, the current made her hair appear to stand on end; her neck was tilted in such a way that although the egglike disks of her eyes were completely submerged, her mouth was not. “No,” her mouth said, and what came out of it was Kayo’s voice. “You shouldn’t do this anymore,” the voice said. “You have to stop.”

  “Kayo?” Helle asked, “is that you?” The voice asked if she wanted proof. The place in the back of the linen press where Daisy hid her money? The location of the snake on Dancer’s body? What about Helle’s trick of pressing her finger on Oluf Froulund’s upper lip to make him stop snoring? Helle should tell Maja that this was the last time. Absolutely. A soul could get caught this way—like trying to leave Tante Mette’s house and always being called back through the door for one final kiss goodbye. Maja should know better. The last time, absolutely. After this there was no telling who might show up. It could be anyone. Helle asked Kayo what he meant, but it was too late. Already Maja was raising herself on her elbows, shaking drops of water from her hair, wiping her eyes. Her movements were mechanical; from time to time her head jerked to one side, she bared her teeth and growled. “Anyone,” she said in the high-pitched, timid voice of Torben Toksvig. Then her shoulders began to heave, like a dog’s just before it gets sick, and Helle averted her eyes.

  Later Maja would describe in detail the method she and Kayo had devised to foil death, a method based on the odd musings of Chang Hsieh, a seventeenth-century Chinese mariner. By Helle’s account, he claimed that every canny sea captain knew that the Atlas-Tortoise—in other words, the whole mysterious world—was no different from the ant you’d see carrying a grain of corn across your floor. There was no such thing as the unfamiliar, Chang Hsieh said, no more danger in meeting barbarian tribes than in “touching the left horn of a snail.” The secret lay in discovering the specific nature of the similarity between, for example, the apparently unfamiliar island you were approaching and the familiar ant. All Maja and Kayo had done was to take Chang Hsieh’s philosophy to its logical conclusion. Thus the soul, confronted with the five hundred and forty doors of Valhalla, needed only discover that element of similarity and—presto!—a door would
swing open in the land of the living, the door in this case being Maja’s mouth. Naturally such a system wasn’t without its flaws: there were two sides to every door, and clearly Kayo had come to resent his sister calling him away from heaven’s infinite supplies of sweet mead and roast pig merely to satisfy her own earthly longings. You could become greedy, always wanting more; the door would swing open and you wouldn’t think of it as a conduit but as a mouth, as the widening jaws of a whale, opening to gather in an abundance of plankton, flotsam and jetsam, small fish, bigger fish.

  It goes without saying that I was skeptical—who wouldn’t have been? A trick, I said; the entire episode was a trick. If Kayo and his sister were so close, if he wrote to her regularly, then there was no reason to assume that he wouldn’t have told her about Daisy’s money, Dancer’s tattoo, Oluf Froulund’s nose. About Helle’s eye, for that matter. Crazy people were notorious for speaking in tongues, and although I was willing to concede that Maja Borge might have been unusually attuned to the uncanny, the episode was just that, uncanny. “As Freud defined the term,” I added, waiting for Helle to express her usual disdain at the mention of that name. But all she did was smile, and remind me there were two sides to every haunting. Remember that, Frances, she said. Two sides.

  YET NOT ONLY Helle’s view of mortality was influenced by the experience in Rappendam, which also clearly extended to the composition of Lahloo. “Scarcely bigger than an ant,” begins Harry Tuck’s menacing second-act aria, “a flaw in the lens, a mote in the eye, a sea pigeon riding a far-off swell, a tern’s shadow fallen from out of the sky? Barbarian isle, barbarian boat, past Leviathan’s smile, down Leviathan’s throat.” He is peering through his spyglass, looking out across the sea—that is, across the audience. You think you’re safe, you think you know who you are. You might be going about your own business, for instance, and the next thing you know you’re being spied on, being seen not as your dull, familiar self but as an exotic. A handsome man sets forth in an opium clipper, arrogant in his assumption that adventure, when it comes his way, will conform to his expectations. But does he suspect, even for a minute, that what he will find is merely one more aspect of what he thought he’d left behind? The long shadows of late afternoon climb the sails behind him—his own shadow, Rattail’s, the figurehead’s. What would Chang Hsieh have made of a man like me, his aria concludes, whereupon Rattail replies that there are creatures of the deep with bright green eyes, diabolic balls of light three feet wide staring up at you from out of the great white hill of a squid’s head. Feathers, I saw feathers, Harry Tuck insists. Rattail laughs, and the figurehead lifts her arms to shake out her long, thick tresses; her face, its expression of cunning and triumph, is lit by the dark red light of the setting sun.