The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Swans and muses, gods and angels! Everywhere you looked in an opera house, Helle said, you should be confronted by the sight of creatures whose proper element was the heavenly ether, reminding you that your purpose in being there was not routine entertainment but transport. Opera houses should be designed with the sole intention of transforming you—to transform your sense of scale, to reduce you, finally, to nothing more than a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, a wildly beating heart. Why else, she asked, pointing, would the Royal Theater have EI BLOT TIL LYST written over its proscenium arch? Not Merely for Pleasure. Rapture, maybe. She closed her eyes. Oh yes, Helle said, definitely rapture.

  Earlier, when I’d left the diner, the sun had been shining; but now I noticed that it had started to rain: a heavy spring rain lowering its own wrinkled, drop-pocked scrim down the window, darkening the room, casting wavery shadows across the trellises in the wallpaper, across Helle’s impermeable face, across Flo’s face, softer-featured and broader yet similarly impermeable. I could hear wheels squeaking in the hallway, the rattling of dishes, a voice saying “No, I did her last time,” and suddenly a matronly teenaged girl in a pink-and-white-striped uniform—the candy striper Helle referred to as the quisling?—tapped at the open door with her pink-enameled fingertip and entered, tray in hand, first flicking on the overhead light and then cheerfully informing us that we were going to go blind. Turn it off! shouted Helle. How many times do I have to tell you I hate fluorescent lights! A handful, the girl confided to me—this one was a handful. Mrs. Brick, she said, heading toward the bed, if I don’t put on the light, how are you going to see your dinner? And if you can’t see your dinner, how are you going to eat it? And if you don’t eat it, how are you going to get well? An insane young woman, I thought. But Helle simply told her to leave the tray on the windowsill, and then asked her if while she was at it could she remove some of those depressing flowers. Those tall pink ones, in particular, were driving her crazy. Not the glads?! exclaimed the young woman.

  It didn’t pay to make them mad at you, Helle remarked after the girl had finally gone; they’d only take it out on you later. Make your bed one of the stops for the doctors-in-training, so you’d have to lie there while ten boy doctors poked their stethoscopes around your poor old naked chest, trying to figure out where your lungs were. Assign Marco to some other wing. That was the worst. It was on Marco’s account, by the way, that she kept the dinner. He had an amazing appetite. Food and women, Helle said—like the Don. She reached into the carton on the bed and took out one of the metal rods. Like you, she said accusingly to the little figure attached to the end of it. A slide, she explained, handing it to me for closer inspection; the characters and the props were all attached to slides, making it possible to move them in and out between the panels.

  The figure of the Don had been lithographed in four colors on heavy-stock paper and then cut out with scissors like a paper doll. He was part of a complete Don Giovanni set which had originally belonged to the Baroness von Schadenheim, and which the baroness had given to Helle in token of their friendship—although that, Helle said, was another story. Evidently the tradition of the model theater came into existence in England around 1800; Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a charming essay on the subject, in which he described the pleasures of purchasing, for a mere two pennies, a set of lithographed sheets containing all of the figures and props and backdrops needed to create a whole new world.

  And it was a whole new world, Helle said, which she and Flo were about to create—specifically, the bog world of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf’s second act, the world Inger drops into when she takes that fateful step onto the loaf of bread. The difficulty, Helle told Flo, was to somehow indicate that even though the bog was a world without air, water and not air was the medium crucial to sustaining life; their challenge was to see to it that the audience understood this on the most visceral level. Obviously you couldn’t fill the stage with sphagnum, nor could you leave it empty. I watched, fascinated, as my daughter gravely nodded her head, took a clean piece of drawing paper from the carton, and removed from her plaid schoolbag the tin of colored pencils. Helle had told her, hadn’t she, that bog moss was transparent? What if there were lots of transparent curtains hanging from—not the ceiling; what was it called, the fly gallery?—narrow strips of curtain positioned at different depths across the stage? She sketched some lines on the paper, sighed, and crumpled it up. No, it would be easier to explain this way, Flo said, taking a roll of string from the carton and cutting off approximately ten two-foot lengths. See, if you stretched these strings from one side to the other, taping them in place like this, you could hang the strips of curtain from the strings like laundry. She cut several sheets of paper into strips and taped the strips at intervals to the strings. If only the paper were transparent! Then you could really get an idea of what it would look like. Of course the curtains, she said, would have the outlines of moss plants painted on them, some with just a single plant, others thickly covered.

  Scrims, Helle said, clearly pleased. We could hang scrims, and manipulate the lighting to make the surfaces either transparent or opaque. Thus the bog might initially appear to be a solid mass of peat, but a section of it lit from behind would suddenly reveal itself as an open channel. A wolf, she said—a wolf! Yes, she said happily, that would work! And the painted outlines, Flo added, could be different colors, layering one on top of another to make new colors—like yellow and blue made green, as she’d learned in school. What they needed, Helle said, were some sheets of that acetate graphic designers used for overlays. That and whatever kind of paint would stick to it. But this would work! The bog would be beautiful, seductive; you’d think, looking at it, that what you wanted more than anything else was the chance to immerse yourself in it. Instead of seeing it as the instrument of Inger’s damnation, you’d see it as magical, even redemptive.

  Still, the problem remained of how to depict visually Inger’s passage from one world to the other. The music would help—the Gasping Aria, for example, which Helle had been working on at night ever since she’d been admitted to the hospital. “Ah air! Addio! Ah ah dear me … oh! Ah! I go where no breeze blows … Ah, sweet despair as down I go….” In what will emerge as the second act’s most frequently reiterated motif, this aria juxtaposes the achromatic, slowly descending runs of the clarinet and cello against the rapid, brightly flickering ascent of Inger’s voice, implying that rather than fighting her new surroundings, the girl is elated by them. “Through skeins of moss and lively water,” Inger sings, “the Bog Queen claims me as her daughter.” Yes, the music would help; but would the audience realize that the world of air and sky—the world Inger was leaving behind—was inherently hostile? Sure they would, Flo said, if the airy world of the first act looked even denser than the bog world of the second. The stage for the first act would also have to be layered with curtains, only lots more of them, and these would be painted with round, globelike shapes that suggested air molecules rather than moss. Then the audience would know that no matter where you were, you shouldn’t take breathing for granted.

  Thus began the final, infamous year of Helle’s life, a year filled with mysteries, not the least of which was her mysterious artistic collaboration with a nine-year-old girl. Dr. Kinglake allowed her to return to the trailer on two conditions: that she stop smoking and that she permit someone to check in on her once a day. “You doctors,” Helle said. “Just because a woman’s dying you think she’s turning into a baby.” “Who said anything about dying?” asked Dr. Kinglake, at which Helle laughed one of her short, dark little laughs. So I would find them, strange old Helle Ten Brix and strange young Florence Thorn, sitting in beach chairs on either side of the fold-down table—sometimes building sets, sometimes discussing an aria, sometimes just listening to Don Giovanni while they sipped apple juice and nibbled cookies. Occasionally Flo would invite Helle to our house for supper, and she would appear grimly at the door, grimly sniffing the air as if for traces of culinary wrongdoing. T
o compensate she’d invite us to the trailer, where we’d be given elaborate feasts. Potage aux herbes panachées, ragoût de veau printanier, freshly baked pain de campagne, a salad of mixed wild greens, rhubarb tart, if she was in a French mood. Zuppa primavera, bruschetta, shrimp grilled in their shells over an open fire, insalata di arancia, blackberry ice cream, if her mood was Italian. One summer night she served us an enormous bisteeya, a Moroccan delicacy made by wrapping alternating layers of pigeon, curdled egg, ground almonds, and cinnamon in warka leaves, a kind of pie you were supposed to eat with your hands, surrounded by tiny glass dishes filled with such colorful and exotic condiments as orange sections and grated radishes in orange-flower water; chopped tomatoes, roast peppers, and preserved lemons; a thick black eggplant jam; a compote of dark-green bitter herbs; sliced carrots and ginger—when you came to eat at Helle’s trailer, you never knew what you were going to find on the table.

  What you could count on was that after the dishes had been cleared away, after Helle—the expression on her face amused because she knew perfectly well that no one was going to challenge her—had smoked a forbidden cigarette, she and Flo would get out the Dukketeatre. They would set it up on the fold-down table, positioning a row of stumpy white votive candles at the foot of its stage, a row of taller white candles behind it. The house lights would go down, Flo would light the candles, Helle would remove the fly curtain. One time it lifted to reveal the paper figure of a girl, a sturdy blond girl in a butcher-blue smock, a pair of bright red shoes on her feet, her feet stuck to a large round loaf of bread not unlike the one we’d just finished eating, floating slowly down through shimmering veils of peat. The tape deck clicked on and we heard Flo singing the Gasping Aria, Helle humming the accompaniment. Another time the curtain opened on four shadowy forms—the Bog Queen and her angry daughters—slowly rising from the bog floor, singing the Replication Canon along with Inger.

  Of course three parts were missing, since only Helle and Flo sang on the tape, weakening the overall effect of its eerily overlapping sequence of complaints about God’s inability, having set the universe in motion, to halt its frightening proliferation of matter. The way it was supposed to be performed, Grudge would begin (“The first cell so lovely”), and as she continued (“he thought he’d make more”), Retaliation would enter (“The first cell so lovely”), followed in turn by Unnameable (“The first cell so lovely”), the Queen (“The first cell so …”), and finally Inger: “The first cell so lovely he thought he’d make more; one cell into two, two into four, four into sixteen, until God got bored … until God got bored … God got bored … God got bored … God got bored …” Meanwhile, mimicking the canon’s pattern, the women’s shadowy paper bodies shuttled back and forth through the veils of peat. God amasses many little things into a bigger thing—a heart perhaps, or a lung—then amasses the big things into even bigger things. Animals. People. His astonishment at the beauty of those first little cells has been replaced by idle curiosity. What will happen, God wonders, if he squashes one of these big things between his fingers? “A burst of light, a flash of heat?” the canon continues. “A feathered soul, a bit of meat? Will it put up a fight? Will it be good to eat?” Thus God’s terrible appetite is born, and with it the terrible human appetite, for weren’t we made in God’s own image? Little by little the intertwining voices of the five women are drowned out by a series of loud, ominous chords: D-minor chords, the very chords with which the Overture to Don Giovanni begins. The women sing louder, millions of little notes piling up on top of each other, but they are overwhelmed by the chords. A boot appears, sticking down through the roof of the bog. Two boots. The strings sough darkly, ominously—lalalala, lalalala—up and down the D-minor scale. The Don falls into hell. The end of Act Two.

  Flo blew out the candles. It was a moonless night in late summer; we sat there in the dark, in the hot trailer, Ruby softly snoring in my lap, a humid breeze sifting through the louvered windows, the metal walls faintly rattling, Helle stifling a cough. “And next?” she said. “Next, the fun begins.” But when she flicked on the light switch the theater was gone, Flo having put it back in its box. Of course the Don would try to seduce Inger. The question was, would he succeed? Well matched, didn’t I think, the Don and Inger? Such a proud, hungry man, such a proud, tasty girl? This was a new Don, by the way, not the one she’d been given by the Baroness von Schadenheim. If I looked closely, I’d see that this Don was wearing glasses. Flo’s idea, Helle said; some children understood, didn’t they, how hapless, how uncontrolled, were the lives of adults.

  II

  YOU WOULD HAVE expected that the Dukketeatre, or at least some of its cutout figures and props, would have ended up in the waxed carton, but you’d be wrong. I spent two Sunday mornings carefully sorting through the papers in the glove box, removing the photographs from the chocolate box and arranging them in orderly piles, painstakingly flipping through the pages of the notebooks and the bound scores, yet all I was able to show for my work was a page torn from Artforum, glued to a piece of cardboard. Damian Spark’s design for the final wave in The Harrowing of Lahloo, Flo informed me, adding that she thought she remembered Helle gluing it to the cardboard to use as a backdrop; and no, in case I was wondering, she didn’t have any idea what had become of the theater itself, although she’d already looked for it everywhere in the trailer. Severe Flo, who ever since Helle’s death had taken to wearing her lank brown hair in a tight little knob at the nape of her neck, who refused to believe that anyone else’s grief equaled her own.

  According to Helle, even though she herself was bad at endings, Damian Spark—who committed suicide on his fortieth birthday, the day after Hitler’s armies invaded Denmark—obviously was not. He was a true artist, she said, a man whose gift was to effect that confluence of poetic detail and scientific illusion without which art is mere decoration, a man whose set designs for Lahloo perfectly realized her own deepest intentions. If only I’d been lucky enough to attend the Guggenheim’s 1958 retrospective of Spark’s work, perhaps I could understand how wrong those critics had been, misinterpreting that final, engulfing wave as apocalyptic, whereas in actuality it was teeming with life. For the wave, she explained, had formed the exhibit’s centerpiece, a huge expanse of fabric billowing down from the museum’s ceiling. One side of the wave was a green so dark as to be almost black, and Spark had painted its surface with strange, wondrous forms: eels whose immense jaws yawned forth from tiny spermlike bodies; clusters of umbellula nodding their milky, tentacular heads; a thick dark fish composed of nothing more than a mouth filled with pale threads of teeth, and a single eye on a wavering eyestalk; bright red starfish; feathery, translucent crabs; glass sponges; medusas and polyps; sea lilies putting forth elaborate plumes like those with which harem girls would fan indolent sultans. The other side of the wave was a delicate and nubile green—the green of luna moths, of new ferns—and painted with lacy scallopings of white foam. What the critics failed to understand, Helle said, was that when the final wave washes over the deck of the Lahloo, it is clearing away the refuse of a greedy, decaying world, and therefore enabling new forms of life to flourish.

  New forms! Anything might happen! For example, you might think you’d been watching the premiere performance of an opera composed by a young man—a young man as engulfed by his black evening cloak as the ship had been by the wave, a thin young man sitting tensely in the third row, just barely visible through your pearl opera glasses—but what finally emerged from the folds of his cloak was a young woman. Because, as Helle told me, it wasn’t Henning Ten Brix who emerged that night from the ship’s wreckage but Helle herself, who walked out onto the stage to take a bow wearing a dress of sapphire-blue shantung cut stylishly short to reveal the silk stockings Daisy had given her six years earlier. Her hair was also stylishly short, her eyes for the first time kohl-lined, her lips for the first time bright red, a pearl choker hiding the tattoo on her neck, silver high-heeled shoes on her feet. A madwoman, Rasmus Rundgren no
doubt thought as he watched her sinuous approach—the result, Helle said, of hours of practice in the hallway of her new apartment. If she were to so much as wobble on her heels, she knew the audience and the cast alike would fall upon her and tear her to shreds; people hate to be reminded of their own credulity.

  Meanwhile, as Helle stood there listening to the tidal ebb and flow of the applause, a few brava!s bobbing up in the undercurrent of murmured surprise and discontent, the future was dropping its own sly hints at her silver-shod feet like flowers. There were Maeve Merrow’s suggestive wink, the critic Aksel Bram’s scowl, the appalling sight of Anders and Viggi Brahe propped against each other in the front row of the balcony like two dying trees, punky and swarming with bugs. Later she would find them waiting for her in the wings, sitting together on a wickerwork basket, the two of them huddled under a tartan-plaid lap robe, opera hats askew on their heads. They both looked old, although in Viggi Brahe’s case, Helle said, the deterioration appeared to be the result of years of insalubrious behavior, while for her father the cause was obviously beyond his control. Whiskers were growing out of the wrinkles on either side of his mouth as well as within the deep folds of flesh beneath his chin; his body appeared faintly phosphorescent, and gave off the powdery, sour smell that no amount of washing would ever remove, because it’s the smell that presages death.