The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  In fact, before she made the mistake of marrying Anders, there had been a time when Ida dreamed of the concert stage. She’d attended the conservatory in Copenhagen, just as Helle was to do; in her dimity shirtwaist and long blue skirt she’d spent hours in the same third-floor practice room where Helle, dressed like a boy, would begin composing her second opera. Escorted by a handsome Flemish bassoon player, Ida had sat weeping in the balcony of the Odd Fellow Palæet as, far below, Paderewski played Brahms’s Piano Concerto in B-flat. She was serious enough, Helle said, but she lacked nerve. That was why her pedagogy was so rigorous: nerveless mothers couldn’t abide nervelessness in their daughters. Of course it was Ida to whom Helle brought her earliest attempts at composition, Ida whose criticisms helped shape the Fantasi, those strange, tantalizing songs which flutter, as so much of Helle’s early music does, at the very portal of the ear. These songs are the obvious precursors of Det omflakkende Møl’s unsettling second-act finale; of, ultimately, “Dancing Sister” or “More has broken than you know.” Nor was Ida herself without talent. At the end of each lesson she would nudge Helle aside on the bench with her bony hip, and then she would begin playing something dauntingly complex and seamless, endlessly romantic and dark. Like a dream, Helle said; no matter what else you might say about her, my mother played like a dream. In those days she favored Chopin, the late études. Meanwhile, on the other side of the open window extended the pale, unreadable face of the bog, intent as usual on its own destiny.

  Which brings me to the last and most troubling aspect of the alliance: Ida’s infidelity. I don’t know how or when Ida first met Viggi Brahe, nor do I know whether she loved him or was merely appeasing her growing sense of loneliness. Indeed, despite the implication of Niels’s letter, the tone of which was too bitter to be entirely convincing, I don’t even know if Ida and Viggi Brahe ever really had an affair, or if Helle made it up. What I do know is that the song Ida’s supposed to have sung whenever she was setting out for an assignation is a real song; called “The Feathered Maiden,” it can be found in Svaning’s Manuscript I, circa 1580, and is assumed to be the inspiration behind the ghastly character of Nightingale in Helle’s 1953 opera, Fuglespil. And I do know that in northern Jutland, in the parish of Torslev, a threadlike tributary to the Rya called Mogens Stream is spanned by six bridges and skirts what used to be a vast stretch of peat land. Or at least such was the case as late as 1915, according to the copy of the map sent to me by the Horns Historical Society. But as to what actually happened that April afternoon when Ida returned to Krageslund chilled and coughing, I only have the most fugitive of clues, a shifting mass of evidence, to augment Helle’s peculiar story. Clues and evidence. I can hear her voice, pinched with disgust: did clues and evidence bring us any closer to truth in the courtroom? It’s my own complicity in these events which is at issue here, and nothing, not even the ghost of a woman who once loved me, can save me from that fact.

  SO IT WAS that on a sunny April afternoon in 1905 a mother and her daughter were walking along a path bordering a stream. Ida and Helle Ten Brix—I’ll insist on that, just as I’ll insist that the stream they were walking beside was the Mogens, not the branch of the Hunger River that turns my road to mud every spring, nor the Wissahickon Creek in Philadelphia, where my mother used to take me to feed the ducks. The path was narrow and chalky, with grooves cut through it at intervals by runoff from Nissen’s pasture on the right: water always seeks to find its way to other water. Air, on the other hand, arranges itself in layers; air is hierarchical. If you took a breath when you were standing up, the smell of clean, fresh air wouldn’t prepare you for what you’d smell if you bent down, scrutinizing at closer range what looked like a cluster of new shoots, white and stringy, but turned out to be a tangle of worms in a pool of spittle. “Foxes,” said Ida. “They’re always wormy from eating mice.”

  Naturally no one wants to be told such a thing when she’s wearing, as Helle was, a coat made of fox fur. In fact, she and Ida were wearing matching fox coats, because, even though the wind was from the south, this was April, an unreliable time of year: soft white coats with pink satin linings, invisibly fastened with silver hooks and eyes. Did Anders Skovløber kill the foxes himself; did he skin them and then dust the pelts with flour in order to remove all traces of blood? Of course not. Who would be dumb enough to think that the figment of a dead composer’s imagination could kill a fox? And while it’s true that Dr. Ten Brix possessed a very fine pair of Spanish dueling pistols—one of which I’m all too familiar with—it’s unlikely that he ever loaded them, let alone fired them at anything.

  “‘Then he put snares on all the trees where the bird was used to sit,’” Ida sang. “‘The small bird used her eyes so well, he couldn’t capture it.’” She was dragging Helle along behind her, the way she did when they went shopping together in town. Town—a horrible place! Her mother never knew what to say to the other women when she met them on the street or in the pork butcher’s. The other women revered Anders, and they couldn’t understand why he’d saddled himself with such an unsuitable wife or why the butcher always saved the purest, sweetest fat for Ida: leaf lard, without which you couldn’t make pie crusts lighter than air—as if Ida’d ever had any interest in baking.

  The farther Ida and Helle got from Krageslund, the stranger the words to the song became: “‘He cut the flesh out of his chest, to hang on the linden tree; the bird’s wings fluttered with delight, such tasty meat to see.’” Now on the left there grew a row of stunted and branchless alders, a dense gray screen through which they could catch their first glimpse of the bog. The stream banks here were steeper, and the path was lined on either side with scrub willows, an indication that the first of the six bridges would soon come into view. It was a sunny day; Ida shaded her eyes in order to make it out. “‘So wins a youth his maiden,’” she sang.

  Once they’d crossed this bridge, they had to find what Helle thought of as the bog’s doorway: a break in the alder screen that gave onto a narrow, almost invisible trail, which, no sooner had you found it, turned to muck. This is because access to the bog—as with all things inviting worship—was made difficult, in this case by the presence of an encircling, protective moat called a lagg, a knee-deep channel filled with sluggish black water. Willow trees and leatherleaf grew thickly in the lagg, their roots snarling under its surface, hooking around your feet or recoiling, pliant and slippery, beneath them. And everywhere from out of openings in the air and brush shot living creatures: voles like drops of mercury from a broken thermometer, wrens and sparrows like fat from a skillet.

  “My mother was always in a hurry,” Helle told me, “any time she was going to meet Viggi Brahe.” But on this particular day Ida seemed more impatient than usual. Helle was doing her best to keep up, inching bit by bit along the mucid bark of a submerged trunk, trying to squeeze sideways through a gap between two willows, when all at once an arm reached out and grabbed the hem of her coat. Only it wasn’t an arm, it was a willow branch—the same kind of branch used by Fru Hansen to find hidden springs underneath the ground, or by Fru Pedersen to make schoolchildren learn their lessons, a moist black branch with reddish striations along its length—and it wouldn’t let go. “Stop,” Helle called out, “please wait!” but Ida only looked back coldly, as if she were trying to figure out what it was, exactly, she was dealing with. “No one,” she said, “I mean no one, has a right to tell another person how to live.” Then she took off, moving faster than before, without another backward glance.

  So it happened that when Helle Ten Brix was a high-strung and suggestible child of seven, she got lost in the Great Bog at Horns. One minute her mother’s white coat was there, about ten yards ahead of her, and the next it was gone, along with all signs of the trail. Was it possible you couldn’t see those signs unless your vision had been sharpened by desire for another person’s body? Maybe such desire could make your body completely malleable, allowing you to ease it through the wet mesh of tree limbs, your arms a
nd legs drawn like a magician’s scarves out of increasingly smaller holes. It was always dark in the lagg, and now the sun was beginning to go down and the insects that come out at dusk, mosquitoes and stinging gnats, were swarming around Helle’s face, greedy for blood. If she tried to brush them away, she’d lose her balance; if she didn’t, they would fly into her eyes and nose and ears.

  When Helle finally managed to make her way to the other side of the lagg, what stretched out in front of her was an empty expanse of peat, an apparently colorless landscape dotted here and there with low-lying shrubs, squat clumps of sweet gale, heath, and snowberry. Three miles away, to the east, the moon was starting to brighten above the chimneys and rooftops of Viggi Brahe’s crumbling estate, Sandhed; behind her, to the west, the sky was changing color, making the fur of her coat appear red at the tips. Her mother was nowhere in sight, the only evidence of her passage a single green rubber boot, lying on its side in the peat. Helle picked it up and tipped the water out of it. How could a person disappear in such a flat landscape? Although the bog’s flatness, she discovered as she started out across it, was illusory; this was in fact a dense mat of sphagnum boiling up at intervals into hummocks, the way oatmeal boils up within a saucepan. The sphagnum was moist and translucent, in some places almost clear, in others deep crimson. Springy, it rebounded beneath her boots; you could be tricked into thinking your footing was secure and then, all of a sudden, sink in up to your knees. If Helle had wanted, she could have let herself fall over backwards onto the moss without taking any of the usual precautions, so soft it was. Still, she suspected that if she were to relax her control even for a second, she might never stop falling; she might end up at the bottom of the bog, where she would find herself under the jurisdiction of a disposition more intemperate, more unforgiving than her own.

  She’d probably walked less than a quarter of a mile when she came upon the peat hag, its cavity filled with what looked like the same black water that flowed through the lagg, but deeper. “Mmm-uh!” said the bog, opening its mouth. “Mmm-ahh!” In school Fru Pedersen had explained how during the Iron Age men and women had been thrown into similar pits as sacrifices to Nerthus, goddess of the earth. Some of them would be found with a hazel withy tied in a noose around their necks, signifying their journey across death’s threshold and into the goddess’s domain; some of them had their necks broken, or slit by a knife. And all of them were perfectly preserved by the tannic acids in the water—tanned, as Fru Pedersen said, “like shoe leather.” On one occasion, when a peat cutter found the body of a girl, Constable Fog had been called in to investigate what appeared to be a recent murder. But the girl had been dead for two thousand years, even though you could still see her delicate eyelashes and her long blond braid, her mouth curving mysteriously upward in a smile!

  These sacrifices always occurred in the spring, to ensure a good harvest. And what about the victims? Helle wondered. She imagined the girl being led by a hushed procession of friends and relatives through the lagg and across the bog. Had she known in advance what was going to happen to her? Had she been proud? Had she walked across this same stretch of peat right before she was to die, uncertain whether or not Nerthus would find her pleasing? In the spring, the snaky crowns of the mosses put forth little stalks and pods formed at the tips; if you were very quiet, you could hear the pods cracking open, releasing their spores into the fresh air.

  At the pool, Helle stopped to think things over. She was tired, but afraid that if she sat down she might ruin her coat. She was also afraid that the reason she couldn’t see her mother was because her mother was no longer standing up. According to Helle, although in those days the typical Danish child learned about sex from watching cows or pigs, at least her own instruction, if not equally explicit, had been infused with a certain mournful sense of romance. Hadn’t she been watching only two weeks earlier as her mother fell into Viggi Brahe’s arms? He’d been waiting for her, leaning over the railing of the second of the six bridges across Mogens Stream, tossing something into the current. Twigs? Coins? Probably sticks: Helle had recognized his ugly brown dog, racing back and forth through the cattails on the far bank, wagging its soaked, ratlike tail. Romantic Viggi Brahe, dressed as usual in a long cape and a tricorn hat, like a man from another century—dramatic Viggi, whose ancestor Tycho spent most of his time looking through a tube at the stars. At her mother’s approach he’d turned and his arm had emerged from under his cape, which fell in deep folds from his shoulders, the fabric as dense and stiff as a horse blanket. First he’d pulled her close to him, letting his hand come to rest on her stomach; because her coat was hanging open, Helle had been able to see how his fingers were sliding down, little by little, causing the skirt to bunch between her mother’s legs. For several seconds they just looked at each other. And then, as Helle watched, her mother had lifted her arms and taken hold of Viggi Brahe’s head, drawing it slowly toward her, the way she’d remove a heavy bowl from the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.

  “I’d tried it out myself,” Helle told me, “so I knew. Something happened if you touched yourself like that. Your legs got weak and you wanted to lie down. I didn’t have any idea what that had to do with men and women, but I knew enough to know that my mother was playing me for a fool.” Similarly, although Anders may have suspected Ida’s infidelity, he never dreamed that she’d go so far as to involve her own daughter in it. By now he would have shown the last of his patients to the door, and would be wandering around aimlessly the way he always did at the end of the day, still filled with a need to alter the course of events. Only he couldn’t do anything about Ida; as far as he knew, she and Helle were off on another one of their pointless jaunts.

  Helle regarded the boot thoughtfully. It seems unlikely that at the age of seven she would have considered it symbolic, although later that was clearly what it became for her, no doubt influencing her account of ensuing events, as well as eventually showing up in the finale to the second act of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. Probably her decision to throw the boot into the pool was nothing more than a reflex action, a simple urge to punish; certainly she couldn’t have known that it would be a factor in her mother’s death. Helle looked at the boot and then she looked at the pool. You couldn’t tell at what point its lip of moss would suddenly droop, spilling you down into that black water across which rowed long-legged insects, leaving the thinnest of wakes. A bird called out, over and over, its song choked and liquid, like a pump starting up. Far to the north a dog started to bark, and much closer, another dog—Viggi Brahe’s?—barked back.

  Taking a deep breath, Helle threw the boot as far as she could. By now it was dark enough that she was just barely able to make out the boot’s trajectory, the way it gracefully arced before hitting the water with a small, reserved splash. For a moment the boot floated there, suspended and upright as if preparing to walk; then it tilted to one side, gradually filling with water until its new weight sucked it under.

  At this point I’m tempted to jump directly to a description of how Anders, with the help of Ove Nissen, finally retrieved Helle from the Great Bog, and how the three of them were still sitting in the kitchen, the men drinking akvavit and smoking their long curved pipes, Helle wrapped in a quilt on the floor near the wood stove, when Ida showed up. I could describe Ida’s appearance—the strands of sphagnum clinging to her coat and her hair, her face dotted with insect bites, the wool stocking on her bootless leg stained brown by the bog. I could describe the way Anders took a mop from where it was propped against the wall among the search party’s spades and lengths of rope, and began pushing it fiercely back and forth through the widening puddle at his wife’s feet. “Ida,” he’s reported to have said, “how good of you to join us.” In other words, now that I’ve got everyone safely into the kitchen, I could refuse to look back. But if I were to do so, I’d be leaving out what Helle claimed was the most important part of the story—the part which, I admit, I have the hardest time believing.

  According t
o Helle, within seconds after the boot had sunk into the water, it somehow managed to arouse those intransigent creatures whom, once upon a time, her mother had described to her: while she watched, terrified, the Furies began to stir within the deep pot of the bog. Initially she thought that what she was seeing were snakes or fish or branches as, immediately below the pool’s surface, a huge, churning knot seemed to be engaged in the act of pulling itself undone. The water tilted up and down, back and forth, pale knobs and crescents occasionally breaking through its black skin; they glistened briefly in the moonlight before sinking down again, out of sight.

  Hands appeared, then forearms, shoulders, heads. Now, Helle said, she could see them clearly, their foul, undulant locks, their blunt muzzles and their open nostrils, their eyes laid flat on skin translucent as a baby’s, beneath which the blood coursed in visible loops. This, she claimed, was how the Furies looked before history made them into human women, replacing the ruthless indifference of their regard with a more familiar expression, that grudging tenderness you see on the wife’s face as she welcomes her husband into bed. There were, as Ida had predicted, three of them in all. “Little girl,” the first of them called out, “we accept your offering.” And then the second asked, “But shouldn’t we tell her the price?” “No one ever believes it,” the first replied. “And in any event,” the third one added, “the boot was empty.” Helle stood looking down at them. “Mother,” she said as one at a time they submerged themselves, each one releasing, as she went under, a wide, viscid bubble. Little by little the water crept back into place. It was as if, Helle said, none of it had ever happened.