Context
from Flotsam and Jetsam
by Aidan Higgins
In
Denmark every day is different; so say the old books. It’s made up of
islands, every island different, and a witch on each. There are over
300 of them. I knew one of them once. She lived in Copenhagen, that
port up there on Kattegat. We were fire and water, like Kafka and
Milena, a daring combination only for people who believe in
transformations, or like boiling water. You were Mathilda de la Mole. No, you were you to the end of your days. Why should I complain? The other day I was thinking of you. The
pale Swedish dramatist who lives over on Sortedam Dossering with a
distinguished Danish theatrical lady claims that he has learnt Danish
in bed. Across the long wall of the Kommune Hospital a solicitous
female hand had inscribed a proclamation to the effect that many of the
nurses there are lesbian, too. Ten years ago the nurses of this city
were regarded as being no better than common whores. Down
there in a basement you had lived like a rat with good old Psycho, in a
lice-ridden hole below street level in a kind of cellar, the walls
green with mould. Water dripped from above, you suffered, Petrusjka was
but a babe. The place was full of furnace fumes by day, rats ran about
at night, chewed up your stockings. Drunks fell down into the area. You
lived there then. I didn’t know you. Where was I? This Danish
capital is a tidy well-run place. The little grey city is relatively
free of the subversive aerosol squirt and graffiti-smeared walls of
West Berlin; though the pedestrian underpass near Bar Lustig is marked
with a daring axiom to the effect that Kusse er godt for hodet, or, cunt is good for the head, with a crude heart pierced by an arrow. You
wrapped newspapers inside your clothes, crouched behind Psycho Kaare,
your arms about him, bound for Sweden. That was your life then. All the
associations with your lovers seem to have been preordained, moving
rapidly towards consummation. He was the third man in your life. Blind
in one eye, 192 centimetres tall, a failed dramatist turned carpenter,
transvestite, father-to-be of little Petrusjka Kaare. You lied
to the shop-girls. The outsize dresses were not for ‘a big mum’, but
for Psycho, wanting the impossible, garbed in female attire, ill,
unshaven, chain-smoking, drinking Luksus beer, looking out the window
into the street of whores. There was a strange smell off his breath.
Both of you were undernourished, half starving. You left him, lived
with an alcoholic pianist for three weeks. Then you couldn’t stand it
any more—there was an even worse smell off him. Empty turps
bottles crowded the WC. You swallowed your pride and approached your
mother for a loan. Mrs. Edith Olsen gave it grudgingly. You returned to
Psycho, the tall unshaven figure in the chair, dressed as a woman,
looking out the window. Then you were standing for an endless
time with your hand on the red Polish kettle that was getting warmer
and warmer; knowing that an important moment had arrived for you. You
would go to bed with him. He would be the father of your only child. So
nothing is ever entirely wasted, nothing ever entirely spent. Something
always remains. What? Shall I tell you? Oh he was a young man
once, and very thin. He knew Sweden, had been there before. He arranged
the papers for renting a house. It was cheap there then. He was writing
one-act plays, a mixture of Dada and Monty Python. They were funny. He
sat cross-legged on a chair, typing away, laughing. As a child he had
done homework with frozen feet stuck to the cold floor. The Royal
Theatre rejected the plays. You loved him. Light came from his face. He
was young once; not any more. In his early forties he had begun to grow
old. Now he is a dead man. The motorbike, covered in sacks, hid under snow. All the boards in the hut creaked. Winter pressed down on the roof. In the dacha,
you and Psycho began starving again. A plump partridge strutted up and
down in the garden every evening. Each evening it returned. Armed with
a stick Psycho waited behind a tree. You watched from the window. The
bird was too clever, Psycho too weak with hunger, the cooking pot
stayed empty. You wept. Then Psycho couldn’t stand it any
longer and left for Copenhagen, the cellar and the rats. He couldn’t
take it any longer. You couldn’t bear to return and stayed on. You were
alone for weeks, made a fire at night, to keep off the living men, and
the dead men too. The dead were full of guile and slippery as eels. Going
into Sweden on the back of Psycho’s motorbike you had almost died of
cold. Motorcyclists are known to experience a sense of detachment, and may not even recall arriving at their destination.
St. Brendan the Navigator saw Judas chained to an iceberg in the middle
of the Atlantic. It happened once a year, by God’s mercy, a day’s
relief for the betrayer from his prison in the everlasting fires of
Hell. But you accepted all the buffetings of fate. You walked
into the forest. You said: ‘It’s difficult to think in a forest. I am
thinking av karse, but the thought never finds its end, as near
the mountains or by the sea. It’s heavy in there, the wall of trees
keeps out the sun. There is absolute silence in a Swedish forest, no
singing birds there. Even the uuuls are silent. Oh that was a miss for me.’ In
the forest you came face to face with an elk. The great prehistoric
head was suddenly there, the mighty span of horns, the mossy tines, set
like an ancient plough into the weighty head. You glared, separated by
only the breadth of a bedroom. The great beast was grey all over, like
a certain type of small Spanish wild flower found in the hills. The
dead flower in the jar of the Cómpeta bedroom. Then, without a
sound, without breaking a twig, the elk faded away into the forest. It
was very quiet there. Heavy too, like the Swedes themselves. They
worked all day, raced home in identical Volvos in the evening, closed
their doors. It was a Shakespearean forest, you thought, with
no dead leaves, no undergrowth, but mossy underfoot. The light there
was very dim, angled in, then draining away. Matterly light,
you thought. Elks moved always in ‘matterly light’, fading back into
the silence out of which they had come. The Swedish-Shakespearean
wilderness.
