The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  “A waste of time,” she replied. “Your little girls are yawning. They can hardly stay awake.”

  Later she would explain to me that the whole thing had been a ploy to get my attention. “Sex is no mystery,” she said. “When poor Kraka, daughter of Sigurd Fafnirsbane, removed the tarred hat her stepfather had compelled her to wear, down fell all her silky hair, and the bakers were so astonished by her beauty that they burned their bread. It’s as simple as that.” Going to the opera had been Sam’s idea, she explained. Even though he knew Helle couldn’t stand Puccini, he’d convinced Maren to buy the tickets; it was his way of getting revenge, because he knew she wouldn’t be able to refuse to go without hurting Maren’s feelings. A clever plan, only it backfired. “To meet you,” she said, “I’d have sat through La fanciulla del West.”

  All of which left me with no clear sense of how to proceed. On the one hand there was the cardboard carton, the tangible, if chaotically assembled, evidence of a life; on the other hand, there was Helle herself, hanging around with the persistence of stale cigarette smoke near my living room ceiling, urging me to ignore that evidence. I still have a copy of the review of Suor Angelica which appeared in the Canaan Sun Herald the day following the storm. After congratulating the Operateers on a job well done and praising individual performers with her usual share of errata—“Rose Thorn was especially enchanting in the role of the littlest novice”—Marjory Stroup went on to describe the scene on the steps. “Upon leaving the theater,” she wrote, “opera-goers were treated to a second performance. Mother Nature opened her bag of special effects, putting on a rare meteorological show complete with lightning and thunder. Although a large maple, one of the magnificent trees planted 25 years ago by the Rotary, was struck by a stray bolt, fortunately no one was hurt, and the tree itself sustained minimal damage.”

  IV

  ACCORDING TO the birth certificate included among the papers in the quilted glove box, Helle Ten Brix was born on August 6, 1897—a reliable enough piece of information and one Helle confirmed herself. Indeed, she liked to say that she’d been born on what she called a “bad day,” by which she meant those days history chooses to be the occasion for its grimmest events—the very day on which, almost fifty years later, the Americans dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. But that’s where such reliability began and ended. For what was I to make of the fact that even though the signature on the certificate was that of Anders Ten Brix, Helle’s father, in his capacity as physician in charge, Helle insisted that her father had been a game warden?

  “He was called Anders Skovløber, or Anders Gamekeeper,” she told me. “At least that’s how the villagers referred to him. And he met my mother one night when he was returning home from the kro in Horns, stone sober, and wandered into the bog.” As Helle described it, a nisse, or bad spirit, was responsible: there was a full moon, and the road from the kro to the manor was, in her words, “straight as a string.” Still, around and around he stumbled, getting wetter and wetter, until eventually he found himself approaching a small hillock at the very center of the bog. This hillock was never under water even during the most violent and sudden of thaws; the only way it could be reached was along a narrow strip of firm land that wound among the quagmires and peat hags. “At first he thought he saw a fairy sitting on top of the hill,” Helle explained. “But on closer investigation the fairy turned out to be a human woman—Ida Johansdatter.” The woman was every bit as wet as himself, although she didn’t seem bothered by her condition. The minute she saw Anders she dropped the carcass of the rabbit she’d been chewing away at and opened her arms. “Heyomdick, heyomdack, come fallerah!” she sang invitingly. So it happened that Helle Ten Brix was conceived on a hill in a bog, her conception supernaturally engineered.

  When I asked what her mother had been doing in the bog in the first place, Helle smiled condescendingly. Naturally my own parents would never have told me tales about the natmænd, those dark-skinned gypsies of Romany origin who wandered the Jutland heath, sharpening knives, poaching game, and speaking their own secret language. Ida, Helle said, had been the illegitimate daughter of Big-Margrethe, a notorious gypsy chieftain, which would explain both the darkness of Helle’s hair and her pronounced hostility to the Danish preference for neatness and comfort. Some of her earliest compositions—the Drallers, or Gypsy Dances—had been inspired by her mother’s extensive repertoire of bedtime songs, as had her eventual use of the so-called gypsy scale for Nanna’s popular virelay in The Harrowing of Lahloo and for the difficult quartet with which Act One of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf concludes. “Two augmented seconds,” she said, “and bang! the next thing you know the ground’s dropping away right beneath your feet.”

  To accept Helle’s version of her provenance was to accept the fact that this alliance was doomed from the start. What is less clear is that at the heart of the problem, at least as Helle understood it, were opposing attitudes not so much toward the law as toward the gratification of appetite, toward food. No matter which version of Helle’s childhood I ended up accepting—and there were several of them to choose from—these elements remained consistent, figuring prominently in her reconstructions of most key events. Moths in a cupboard; poison in a safe. A poacher and a gamekeeper. Sorting through her books one day I uncovered a small volume, its cover pale blue and water-stained, a collection of stories by a nineteenth-century Danish writer with the improbable name of Steen Steensen Blicher—“the Danish Jane Austen,” according to the prefatory note in the English-language translation I eventually tracked down and read. I did this because certain passages in Helle’s copy had been heavily underlined and starred, and I couldn’t help noticing the repetition of such words as skovløber, natmænd, and nisse. In one story a gamekeeper is returning from Viborg on a moonlit night when he finds himself mysteriously lured into an elder bog by a red-capped sprite. In another a crazy, spade-wielding woman sings a song about betrayal, each verse of which ends with Ida’s words from the hummock. Or to quote Niels Ten Brix, Helle’s half-brother and the father of Maren, “The whole thing’s a pack of lies.”

  He turned out to be still alive, running a small dry-cleaning business in Hjørring when he finally decided to respond to my letters requesting information. Ida, he wrote, had been the only daughter of a Copenhagen coffee merchant, and she met Anders—who was, Niels went on to assure me, a doctor—at a wedding party. Anders was the groom’s cousin; the bride was Ida’s best friend. “My father told me,” Niels wrote, “that Ida had been a pretty woman, but infirm, and spoiled rotten when he met her. A spoiled little girl who ran into the arms of the village idiot the minute things didn’t go her way.” He went on to extol the virtues of his own mother, then closed by reminding me that the past was the past, and only fools or archaeologists dug around in it.

  I wasn’t surprised by any of this. Certainly on more than one occasion Helle had shared with me her ideas about invention and discovery, expanding on a theme central to her art. Women, she would say, were the world’s inventors; it was only after the fact that men came along and discovered whatever it was that women had already invented. The act of invention was basically lawless, whereas the act of discovery required the making of laws, an endless cataloguing, describing, judging, and ultimately, dismantling of the thing discovered. Looked at through this lens, wild Ida, perched on her hillock, could be seen as the inevitable result of a daughter’s need to invent a mother consistent with her vision of the truth. I knew that if I was going to finish Helle’s opera, I would have to honor this philosophy; I also knew that Helle had been aware of my basic resistance to it when she chose me for the job. As usual, she had something up her delicate, lace-paneled sleeve—its elegance designed to divert your attention from the willful strength of the arm hidden beneath it, that strong white arm snaking toward me through the water-flecked light of a hot summer morning. Running water, the apprehensive thumping of my heart, the smell of cedar mixed with the smell of cigarette smoke. But memory merely serves to promote h
omage to the dead, while what Helle wanted was nothing less than resurrection.

  SO: Helle Ten Brix was born on August 6, 1897, in the master bedroom of a large, drafty manor house, a graceless rectangle of yellow stones located within the parish of Torslev, Dronninglund hundred, village of Horns. That’s a fact, as was the presence of the Great Bog immediately outside the bedroom window. Because it was summer the window was open, letting in the faint sound of the bog’s crepitations, a soft crackling noise, like a piece of paper that had been wadded up and thrown away and then, all on its own, began to uncoil. The sound of uncoiling in those days was everywhere: the world was preparing for war. In Austria the Baroness von Suttner was writing in her diary, “Cold, cold are all hearts, cold as the draft which penetrates the rattling windows,” while in Essen Krupp’s factories were turning metal into gold.

  But on that August night the world was still at peace; the air as it ruffled the bedclothes was tepid and dissolute with the smell of roses. Empress Josephine, Louise Odier, Baroness Rothschild, Lady Caroline Lamb—they bowed their heavy, aristocratic heads, accepting the strange fate by which they’d been resurrected as flowers in a formal garden on the northern tip of the Jutland peninsula. Such an inhospitable setting, so severe and windblown! It was here that ten thousand years earlier the glacier had deposited an infertile mixture of sand and clay, hills and hollows pocked with aquatic flotsam, narwhal tusks and baleen; with chunks of amber containing the skeletons of prehistoric insects. Glacial meltwater filled the hollows and, while its tendency was to form lakes and streams, to seep out toward the sea, in some places the water got trapped. It became brown and acidic, unfit for the bacteria which promote decay, so that whatever fell into it was granted a terrible kind of immortality. Arrowheads, reindeer bones, hazel catkins, the bodies of Iron Age men and women—all of these things settled within the slowly developing layers of peat. Thus the Danish bogs were made, those self-contained landscapes, treacherous but beautiful. If Helle was right, and landscape is destiny, then it makes perfect sense that she would have been born on the edge of a bog.

  Just as it makes sense that her birth would have been difficult. From what I’ve been able to piece together, although Ida’s water broke at noon on August 5, she didn’t experience the transitional stage of labor until some time shortly before midnight, then worked hard for another three hours to push the baby out. “I was born at ulvetimen,” Helle told me, “and I will die at ulvetimen.” This was on her deathbed, and she didn’t have the energy to elaborate. But I knew that ulv meant “wolf,” and that she was talking about that moment in the day when, according to Danish folklore, a hole appears in time’s otherwise impenetrable fabric, allowing spirits to enter the world or to leave it. The birth and the death—maybe the reason I find it possible to imagine the one is because I was there to watch the other. Why else would I be able to see so clearly that little section of scalp, that dark sliver turning to an oval, to a circle? When Helle was dying she asked me to press my hand down on the top of her head because, as she explained, her spirit kept swimming up into her cranium, resisting her efforts to exhale it through her mouth. The Hindi, she said, used to trepan their dead, to make sure no spiritual residue got left behind. And I could feel it, her—the pulse of that life, as perverse and combative in the end as it had been in the beginning.

  Unfortunately the rest of the scene has a cloudy, dim quality, the result of conflicting information. If Anders Ten Brix was, as Helle said, a gamekeeper, he must have had his hands full trying to deliver a baby. For Helle also claimed that it had been her father who cut the umbilical cord, who wiped her body clean of all signs of her mother’s body, who suctioned out her nasal passages with a pointed rubber bulb. What he was doing, she said, was making sure that the first thing she smelled would be him. Hadn’t I noticed the way she reacted to the odor of unwashed male hair, or that particular scent on a man’s breath compounded of red wine and garlic and tobacco? At such moments she would get quieter than usual, could feel her nostrils compressing. And she would find herself thinking about how the god Loki gave birth to Odin’s horse after getting himself pregnant by eating a woman’s heart.

  By now it would have been almost four in the morning. Shadows, blue like whey, would have been puddling in the corners of the room. In the summer, in Jutland, the sun never goes all the way down; it makes the furniture gleam like mother-of-pearl, like something you’d want to lick, something sweet and bitter at the same time, similar to packaged almond custard. The headboard of the bed, for instance, in which were carved the bodies of four crows: several years later it would infuriate Anders when he caught Helle, awake long past her bedtime, sucking dreamily on one of their clawed feet. It would infuriate him, but it was his fault. He was the one, after all, who’d insisted that Ida was too small-breasted to produce milk, who’d bottle-fed Helle a specially prepared formula, a mixture he concocted himself, even as Ida strained to expel the afterbirth. He pursed his lips; he made small kissing sounds. On the bedside table there was a metal pan where knives swam in pinkish liquid.

  Four crows signify success in childbirth; it probably should have been eight for grief. Or maybe nine, for a secret. The house was called Krageslund, which means Grove of Crows. They roosted in the lindens which bordered the property, and if startled they all took off at once, darkening the sky so you’d have to light the lamps to see what you were doing. I suppose, eventually, Helle fell asleep. As for Ida, she buried the afterbirth in the rose garden the next day. You had to do this, for luck.

  V

  ONLY IDA WASN’T a lucky woman. Even before succumbing to the tuberculosis which finally killed her, she often suffered from fevers and migraines, spending whole days in her darkened bedroom with a damp cloth on her forehead. When at last she got up, strands of black hair would be stuck to her temples and cheeks, giving her face a crazed look, like a porcelain plate on the verge of cracking into pieces. Although Helle suggested that this was the price her mother paid for leaving the bog, for denying her gypsy origins, it seemed to me that Ida’s ill health might actually have been the way she’d found to triumph over Anders: the only doctor in the parish of Torslev, and he couldn’t cure his own wife.

  In such a marriage it’s not uncommon for the weaker partner to turn a child into an ally, a strategy that Ida developed on three separate fronts. To begin with, she encouraged Helle to join her in the complicity of the infirm, their noses lowered nightly above a steaming pot into which had been let fall three drops of eucalyptus oil. Some children are cursed with a genuinely frail constitution; if a single germ is floating on the breeze, it will seek them out. Only this didn’t happen to be the case with Helle, who was merely skinny, whose longing to uncover symptoms—that faint prickling at the back of the throat as if some tiny thing were scrabbling there for purchase, that heaviness in the head which made the neck feel like a pipe cleaner—was nothing more than a longing to please her mother. “Macbeth, Act One,” Anders would say whenever he came upon his wife and daughter thus engaged at the kitchen table. “He thought he was so funny,” Helle sneered. She said she’d never known a man who hadn’t been given to laughing at his own jokes. Whereas Ida rarely laughed, not having much in the way of a sense of humor. An unlucky woman, an unhappy woman. If I didn’t know how dangerous it is to make a virtue out of weakness, I’d probably feel sorry for her.

  The second aspect of the alliance centered around the piano, Ida’s Pleyel baby grand, a wedding present from Anders to his new bride, and her only belonging that he didn’t ship off to the poorhouse in Hjørring immediately following her death. Eventually this piano came to stand in the corner of what was referred to as the morning room, even though it was on the west side of the house, facing the bog, and remained cool and dim until mid-afternoon. But Ida had preferred this room to the other, sunnier room where Anders had originally put the piano; she liked to keep an eye on the bog while she played. Ida Ten Brix, so pretty and young, so eager to try out her present that she never noticed
how the train of her wedding dress kept catching on its pedals. Did she really look like a cat, or was that just the romantic fancy of the artist (Viggi Brahe, I assume) who drew the little ink portrait I found in the glove box? And would she really have chosen to play “After the Ball,” as Helle claimed? Certainly this would have been an odd, even premonitory choice, with its theme of broken glassware and broken hearts. Unlike Helle, however, Ida never paid attention to the words of songs.

  As for Anders, he had by his own admission a tin ear. It wasn’t until Ida was dead that he started to pound away at the piano, the way a child might, exposing its capacity for gibberish. Clearly his reason for keeping it had nothing to do with its sentimental value; maybe it was just too big to dispose of. In any event, Ida began giving Helle lessons in the fall of 1901, not long after her fourth birthday. Before that the only instrument she could play was a large Swiss music box, its panels hand-painted with scenes from fairy tales, and she had to be watched constantly to make sure she wasn’t turning the crank in the wrong direction. Or so Helle said. For although she composed her first opera when she was twelve years old, the same age at which Mozart composed La finta semplice, she wanted you to know that that was where the resemblance began and ended. Even when she was a very little girl, Mozart was Helle’s idol, her guiding spirit, her delight and her inspiration. Sweet Wolfgang, she called him, willing to forgive him, as she would forgive no other man, for what she referred to as an accident of gender.

  The first piece she learned was Mozart’s Minuet in G. Ida prepared a simple arrangement, which Helle was to play with her right hand only. Her left hand was to rest, palm up, in her lap. It would appear that Ida was an exacting teacher: she refused to let Helle touch the keyboard until she’d proved that she could curve her fingers in the proper position around an apple; if Helle’s wrist drooped, Ida would hit it with a knitting needle, reminding her to think of herself as a puppet, her arm suspended from the ceiling on wires. Later came the Czerny exercises, the Leschetizky method, Breithaupt’s oddly tiring principles of relaxation. Once or twice Ida blindfolded Helle, urging her to feel the music with the tips of her fingers, in her elbows, along her spine.