The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  Of course by now Helle understood all too well the source of her father’s cheerful mood, just as she knew who was responsible for the condition of the milk. Gunhild Toksvig, her stupid classmate Torben’s equally stupid eighteen-year-old sister—slatternly Gunhild, the so-called housekeeper Anders had hired a year ago to restore order to their lives, even though Gunhild didn’t know how to cook and, when she did, the pots boiled over and she never bothered to wipe the stove clean. If the fire went out, Gunhild would yank open a lid and blow hard on the embers, sending forth a gray shower of ash. She thought sweeping was a bore, and long after she’d gone home you could still see the prints of her large feet everywhere. On more than one occasion Helle had followed Gunhild’s footprints out of the kitchen and up the back stairs—dark, ashy smudges such as an elephant might leave—until they disappeared into the flowers of the hall runner.

  “I heard the rumors,” Helle said, “but I tried to ignore them.” Gunhild couldn’t cook and couldn’t clean, yet Anders went so far as to give her a raise, and then took her out to celebrate at the best restaurant in Frederikshavn, where, he claimed, she made a favorable impression on the wine steward. Harder for Helle to ignore were the changes in her father’s appearance, his former look of dishevelment giving way to a new attentiveness to grooming. At Gunhild’s urging he’d grown a beard, a thrush-colored bush, and strode around the house attired in a gray serge shooting jacket and a pair of black leather jackboots, all the while brandishing a walking stick with a silver handle in the shape of a fox head. “Sarastro,” she said. “He was like Sarastro. Large and confident and beaming. All that was missing was the gold robe and the devotion to his daughter.”

  In Den onde Stedmoder, or The Wicked Stepmother—one of the three song cycles Helle was to compose during her last year at Krageslund, the other two being Sange til Inger (Songs for Inger) and Den mørke Spisestue (The Dark Dining Room)—we receive a fairly detailed, if biased, description of the woman who was to become Anders’s second wife. “Round white face and pouting lips,” the first song proclaims, “Hair like corn silk specked with thrips.” The song goes on to describe how although Gunhild’s limbs were slender, the flesh moved loosely over her bones as if once upon a time she’d been very fat. And although she wore the costume of servility—an encompassing white apron over a dress of brown hopsack—Gunhild was clearly the kind of girl who’d never been assailed by doubts, the kind of girl who always thought she was getting exactly what she wanted because she never entertained the possibility of an alternative. “My enemy,” the song concludes, “dull as a poker, blunt as a log; though a king’s kiss woke her she remained a frog.” Or, as a later song elaborates, you could always recognize the enemy by its resemblance to whatever weapon you used to beat it off. Interestingly, the libretti for all of Helle’s compositions dating to this period were in English—her original purpose in abjuring her mother tongue having evidently been to conceal from prying eyes any hint of her deepest, most shocking thoughts.

  On the Saturday in question Helle had been sitting at the piano for hours, attempting to retune it according to the rules of the mean-tone system, a method of tuning originally in use around 1500. Because, in the mean-tone system, what you end up with is a perfect third and an almost perfect fifth, the triads sound much purer than those produced according to the rules of equal temperament (that division of the octave to which our ears are accustomed). Purer and yet troublesome, for as you continue projecting such a series of mean-tone fifths, an odd discrepancy is created between the sharps and the flats, a sort of hole in the harmonic texture, which is called—just like that other, mystical hole in the hours of the Danish day—a “wolf.”

  It isn’t easy to retune a piano, and Helle was growing irritable. Rain was approaching from the west, falling out of a single dark cloud over the village, as if someone had let down a curtain on that world of idle chatter and commerce, abandoning her at the very back of the huge, quaking amphitheater that was the bog. The village, with its squat yellow houses like those mushrooms called gristleballs which popped up out of the bog in the summertime! Did the villagers actually think it would do any good to have positioned a church between their foolish houses and the sixth bridge? Plink plink plink—Helle could almost hear them, the little hooves of the Bog Queen’s baby demons, prancing across the wooden planks. The church tried to ward the demons off with the thick, admonitory shadow of its steeple, but they couldn’t have cared less. They scampered right through the shadow, intent on creating discord.

  Plink plink plink. B-flat B-flat B-flat. Mozart had whole orchestras at his disposal, and Helle was stuck with a single piano! Besides, what was the difference, after all, between B-flat and A-sharp? And why had Fru Nissen picked today to take Inger with her to Hjørring to buy a confirmation dress? It served them right, Helle thought, if they were getting rained on. In his examining room Anders was lecturing one of his patients about the merits of electricity and the dangers of the Kaiser; like pebbles, the first drops of rain struck the side of the house. As the squall advanced west from the kitchen toward the morning room, Helle could hear the sound of windows being slammed shut one by one, while Anders yelled, “Mark my words, Morocco is only the tip of the iceberg!”

  I don’t question that Gunhild was the kind of woman who wouldn’t bother to knock before entering a room, or that the first thing she’d have asked Helle, after throwing open the morning room door, was whether she wanted to end up hunchbacked like the poor creature who gave her piano lessons. But I do find it hard to believe that a woman who lived her entire life in a village in northern Jutland, who moved her lips when she read, whose idea of luxury was a chicken dinner in Frederikshavn, could have been the imperious and sly villain Helle made her out to be. Oh, I’m well acquainted with Helle’s need for villains. Whereas it seems more likely to me that what Helle saw as Gunhild’s villainy was merely her persistence, the dogged way she had of deciding that something was going to happen, and then not relaxing until it had. Gunhild had grown up with five other children in one of the smallest of the village’s yellow houses, and probably the only thing she wanted was to be the mistress of a household that possessed electricity and running water.

  I assume it was this quality which most endeared her to Anders, who by 1908, after three years alone with Helle, was no doubt completely worn out, and tired of having to rely on signs—a curled lip, a bit nail—to understand his daughter’s intentions. It was bad enough that he had to do this as a doctor. Didn’t cells die, regularly, even in the healthiest of bodies? But whether those cells were normal or diseased was a more difficult question. Generally, it was the sick cell which refused to die, becoming obsessive, swallowing up everything around it. When Anders looked at his daughter, what did he see? A skinny creature with long unwashed hair and sallow skin, her fingers constantly moving, deriving music you couldn’t hear from the edge of any horizontal surface? There is no question that this habit of Helle’s made mealtimes unbearable. Gunhild Toksvig may have been persistent, but at least she wasn’t obsessed.

  At first Helle continued to monkey around with the piano, adjusting pins, tapping at the keys, plucking at the strings, humming. Then she began to play a line of melody from Schlick’s “Da Pacem,” figuring that it was sure to bore Gunhild, whose taste in music ran toward the maudlin or, more often, the bawdy, her favorite song being “Old Mister Cock and Little Miss Pussy.” For Gunhild, Helle said, there was no real difference between desire and the gratification of desire. This explained her antipathy to Schlick or, for that matter, to any form of art; it also explained why she was such a rotten cook. But Gunhild refused to be ignored. She told Helle that she had something to show her, something important. In the kitchen. It would only take a few minutes. “Eventually I gave up,” Helle said. “It was the only way to get rid of her.” She followed Gunhild down the hall, taking note of the way she swung her hips from side to side, of the way the two middle buttons on the back of her blouse were missing, revealing a dirty g
ray sliver of chemise.

  What did Helle expect to find in the kitchen? Evidence of her own domestic shortcomings—a rind of cheese on the counter, a smear of butter on the doorknob, a sweater hanging over the back of a chair? No, when they entered it the room looked neat enough. It was warm, too, the windows opaque with steam, because a kettle of water had been left boiling on the stove. “Now that we’re here,” Gunhild said pleasantly, “why don’t we have a cup of tea?” She settled herself at the table and began wagging her foot up and down, buffing her nails on the hem of her dress. “Well?” she said. It took several minutes before Helle realized that Gunhild wanted her to make the tea. “Things are different now,” Gunhild said. “And the sooner you understand that, the better.” She suggested that some shortbread might be nice. Wasn’t there a tin of shortbread on the top shelf of the cupboard, between the sugar and the salt—the tin with a picture of men wearing kilts on its lid? “The water’s already boiling,” Gunhild said. “All you have to do is pour it in the pot. That shouldn’t be so hard, now, should it?”

  No matter how much of her memory got erased by old age and sickness, Helle told me, she would never forget that moment: the room darkening as the rain, its roar more like fire than water, began to consume the house; Gunhild’s boxlike foot wagging; the smooth and impartial wood of the cupboard door into which some long-dead Freda had carved her name. “I opened the cupboard door and out they flew,” she said—hundreds of small, white moths, their papery wings beating all around her face as they made their way up toward the ceiling, or out toward the far reaches of the kitchen. They seemed to release a fine trail of something like flour wherever they landed and, as small as they were, Helle was left with the queer impression of having seen, in the instant when they first rushed out at her, their eyes: unexpectedly large and gray, avid with anticipation of finding a newer, more interesting world than the one which they’d known inside the cupboard. Or possibly what she took for eyes may have been the markings on their wings. Who knows? A moth settled on the stove, sizzled briefly, and turned to chaff. A moth settled on the tea in Gunhild’s cup, fluttered its wings wildly, and drowned.

  “Poor thing,” Gunhild said, plucking the dead moth from her cup. “I’d prefer some of that shortbread,” she added, pointing.

  Of course Helle should’ve known that Gunhild’s plan would not be limited to the leveling of a single plague, just as she should’ve known that where a cupboard is full of moths there must also be a place of origin, a hatchery. But what she could never figure out was how the moths got inside the tin to begin with and how, once in, they got out. The lid was snug, hard to pry off. Still, Helle managed and was met with the loathsome sight of moths in every possible stage of development. Clusters of bead-shaped eggs were lodged among the flocculent remains of what must have, at one time, been shortbread. If you looked closely you could see that that flocculence was due to a more general distribution throughout the tin of a dense, wooly secretion, cocoons with dark pupae throbbing and pulsing inside of them, getting ready to be reborn. Worms were everywhere. They clung together in churning, tentacular groups, or they crept forth, individually, like animate grains of rice, and you couldn’t tell which end was which or in what part of their bodies the mind, if you could call it that, was hidden. There were also several actual moths in the tin, sluggishly creeping across the crumbs, as if they hadn’t yet figured out how to fly.

  Gunhild meanwhile continued to sit at the table; when Helle looked back at her the image had acquired an unnatural precision, a strange detachment, not unlike the images you see through binoculars. The shortbread, Helle remembered, had arrived in the house shortly after her mother’s death, an offering from Old Clara. These gifts from sympathetic neighbors—the haunches of venison, the pickled herring, the loaves of bread, the fish balls, and the basins of stewed fruit—comprised what her father had referred to with mounting irritation as the “funeral meats.” Though Helle had tried to avoid thinking of what happens to a human body after it dies, she became hysterical; the next thing she knew she was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor with the contents of the upturned tin strewn all around her, and Gunhild was slapping her face.

  “Well, this is a fine mess!” Gunhild said. Once moths got into a kitchen, she explained, it was almost impossible to get rid of them; she’d seen it happen to her aunt in Skagen, so she knew. They got into the flour, the dried beans; they even devoured an entire jarful of imported almonds, which her aunt had been saving to make her famous julekage. “Are you going to just sit there like an idiot,” Gunhild asked, “or are you going to help clean this up?” When Helle told her that it wasn’t her fault, Gunhild took hold of the skin of her cheek and pinched it, hard. “Wake up,” she said. “The days of Princess Helle are over.” Then she stuck her left hand in front of Helle’s face so that she could see the ring, a thin gold band set with a single, clear stone. “Do you know what this is?” Gunhild asked. “A diamond. It’s a diamond engagement ring. And do you know where I got it?”

  The rain had stopped; there was only the isolated drip drip drip of water beading up and falling from the roof, from the branches of the trees. The sun was coming out, too, shining on the wet windows. Of course Helle knew where Gunhild had gotten the ring, just as she knew how her father had been duped. He’d been taken in by that peculiar quality—the shirred, yellowish smell Gunhild gave off, which Helle, despite her innocence in such matters, knew had to do with sex—to which men remain uniformly susceptible. Even an ascetic’s head can be turned: this is why they make such a point of their asceticism, carrying it around like a shield. But men can afford to be susceptible. When they succumb, they have nothing to lose except, momentarily, their dignity. And afterwards, what they get is a wife.

  II

  OF COURSE I KNOW the composition of Det omflakkende Møl involved more than Helle’s discovery of moths in a shortbread tin; that juxtaposed against her obvious fascination with disintegration and mutability was her passion for the immutable Inger, a fairy-tale battle between darkness and light, death and life, the Queen of the Night and Sarastro. For isn’t it true that in the world of fairy tales what is strange is also reliable; that the roses growing above a mother’s grave might suddenly begin to jabber, but their advice, however disconcerting, is always calculated to restore order? In 1909 Helle had not yet concluded that this order might prove hostile rather than helpful—though it was important for me to remember that even after she had, she continued to find inspiration in such tales. For example, her childhood copy of L’Oiseau bleu, beautifully illustrated and well thumbed, was among the few books she brought with her from Denmark in 1944. She gave this book to the twins on the occasion of their ninth birthday, having first drawn a line through the original inscription—“til min strikse og elskede Helle, 6de August 1908” (“for my strict and sweet Helle”)—and replaced it with her own: “For Florence and Ruby, the one not so strict, the other so sweet, as they want me to believe.”

  Nor did I ever discover who had written that first inscription. By 1908 Ida was dead, and the books Anders bought his daughter tended toward the informative: A Boy’s Guide to the Minerals, How to Build a Bark Canoe, Svendsen’s History of the Danish People. As for Inger, she seems too interested in getting presents herself, and too self-involved to engage in anything resembling character analysis. “There are a lot of things about me you’ll never know,” Helle said when I asked. “Are you jealous? Frances is jealous!” Then she got down on her hands and knees to play one of those endless games of slapjack with the twins, a cone-shaped party hat perched on her head. Maybe I was jealous—though on behalf of Francie Thorn who was never admired except for her vaguely debauched good looks, for the gap between her two front teeth, which, as one of her English teachers had told her, had been the tip-off to the Wife of Bath’s easy virtue.

  But what I was talking about was L’Oiseau bleu, among whose copious marginalia I found not only an expected gloss for translation, but also notes hinting at some la
rger purpose. Why else would “Møl—Anden Akt?” (“Moth—Second Act?”) be written in the margin next to Cat’s first long speech, the facing illustration completely obliterated by a note, the gist of which is that it would be a great accomplishment (“en stor dåd!”) to have a bag of sugar sing an aria? During Helle’s adolescence this tendency to appropriate material was still raw and unformed. Indeed, her first attempts at appropriation were more like outright theft; later it was only in describing her own life, as in the Steen Steensen Blicher episode, that she resorted to such tactics. “I guess I’m like one of those birds,” Helle admitted, “who’s always finding an unfamiliar egg in its nest left there by a cuckoo. Who wouldn’t hatch it—or else crack it open and make an omelette?”

  I suppose Det omflakkende Møl could be written off as juvenilia. But even though its plot is hopelessly convoluted and its music derivative, it isn’t without its share of moments foreshadowing future musical brilliance, dark hints of Helle’s evolving sensibility. Besides, who was I to judge? Gap-toothed Francie, who at the age of twelve spent whatever time she wasn’t glued to True Confessions either grilling the laundress for details about her love life or plotting ways to win Tom Lupone’s heart. At the age of twelve could I have imagined, as Helle did, a curse capable of transforming a love-starved young girl into a cold-blooded and inconsequential creature, for whom the object of her desire would feel nothing but revulsion and pity? It never occurred to me that the more ardently I desired Tom Lupone, his insolent and long-limbed body, the more I would find myself changed into the very thing which would make it impossible to get what I wanted. Twelve? I didn’t even know that at thirty. Nor could I have invented a character such as the Nisse, whose moony face Helle caused to pop up randomly throughout Act One, now from behind a wood stove, now from the other side of a window, now from under Princess Falena’s chair, now from within a tub of potatoes—his face, in fact, like a potato, the features sprouting from it shapelessly, strangely, as if from a multitude of eyes. The Nisse tells us that he can go anywhere, be anything, passing through “walls like water, walls like air, frail as silk, dense as despair.” He wears a colorless, cushion-shaped hat, alternately flaccid or tumescent, depending upon his proximity to the princess. And it is the Nisse who puffs up his podgy, misshappen cheeks, causing a wind to blow open the cupboard door, revealing a silver tin on the bottom shelf.