Читать книгу Virginia - Jens Christian Grøndahl - Страница 6

You could never get used to the sound, the distant drone of aircraft engines passing high overhead in the night. It was hot under the sloping timber roof, and she kept her window open. She lay with one leg outside the duvet, breathing in the stuffy holiday cottage air and feeling the cool breeze on her calf and thigh, listening to the small dry click when the wooden edge of the black-out curtain bumped against the window-frame. She’d just had her sixteenth birthday that summer, the only time she stayed at the house by the sea. She didn’t belong here. She slipped out of our life and we slipped out of hers.

Every night she waited for the planes. She wasn’t afraid, she knew they wouldn’t drop any bombs here, where there was nothing but beach and fjord and scattered houses. To start with, the sound could hardly be distinguished from the beat of the waves behind the sand dunes. Shortly afterwards it flew over the roof the sun had heated up in the course of the day, so the room was heavy with stale air, the smell of dust, mattress and forgotten summers. Many years later she said that smell always reminded her of the war. She is dead now. I am the only one able to piece the story together after a fashion. Only she and I knew about it, and for years we only knew our own side of it.

The house is still there. Several more cottages have been built around it, but at that time it stood by itself, a little apart from the cluster of houses beside the road, where there was a grocer’s shop and a pub. The countryside has not changed, the sea and the beach, the dunes with marram grass and the semi-flooded stretch of meadow-land running inwards behind the coastline, at the end of the fjord. There are the same tufts and grass-covered tongues of land crowded with birds, taking off above the quiet water and gathering between the clouds and the water surface in flashing flocks that remind you of huge, revolving radar screens.

She was not familiar with this part of the country. Brought up in Copenhagen, she had lived there alone with her mother in a small flat near the harbour for as long as she could remember. Her father had left them when she was a month or two old, she had never met him. Her mother worked at home, she was a dressmaker. Half the living room was taken up by the big table with the sewing machine, clothes stands, dressmaker’s dummies and shelves for bolts of cloth. When one of her mother’s customers came she had to do her homework in the kitchen. Sometimes she withdrew to the small bedroom, where their beds stood, so close to each other and the walls so that you had to edge between them sideways. In the evenings they cleared half the table so there was a space for them to eat, the mother and the daughter – the daughter who stayed at a house beside the North Sea one summer listening to the sound of the waves behind the dunes and the English aeroplanes.

Maybe she would think about her mother, who had stayed in town. Maybe she would think about the flat they lived in, and the things she had known as far back as she could remember. The shining wheel of the sewing machine and the heavy scissors on the work table. The view between the house plants to the block opposite and the view from the bedroom, which looked onto the courtyard. The sweetish rotten smell of rubbish from down there in summer. The fog that descended in autumn like a grey veil in front of the grey walls and dark windows. The sound of ships’ fog horns out in the Sound, muffled and long drawn out, like an empty bottle makes when you blow into it.

One afternoon her mother had knocked at the bedroom door as she sat on her bed reading. Her mother didn’t usually knock. She asked her to come in for a moment, her voice sounded almost polite. A lady sat in the living room, she had passed the time of day with her several times before. One of her mother’s regular customers. The lady had been kind enough, her mother said, to ask whether she might like to spend the summer holidays with her and her husband.

She didn’t understand, she had only spoken a few times to the strange woman and then only to answer the usual questions about school. Nor could she understand her mother, who suddenly seemed like a stranger herself. She wondered at the way her mother introduced the surprising offer with: ‘had been kind enough . . .’. They could hardly look each other in the eye, she and her mother, who sat on the edge of her chair with her hands in her lap and drooping shoulders. The other woman had already put on her hat.

‘We have to help each other, don’t we?’ she said. She had painted lips, they smiled between her vigorous cheeks, as if by their own volition. As if the smile was a kind of involuntary twitch in her otherwise motionless face.

Sitting in the train, the girl thought of her mother, and later, when she lay awake at night in the cramped bedroom they assigned to her. They had emptied a drawer in the chest where she could put her clothes. The drawer rattled so loudly it must have been audible all over the house. She thought of the little flat near the harbour as the train carried her through the landscape.

At that time the journey took the best part of a day. You could hardly see there was a war on. Only at the stations and in the brief glimpses of streets beside the railway lines passing through the provincial towns could you catch a glimpse of the strange uniforms and military vehicles now and then. It was the same landscape as before and then later, with corn fields and forest and water sparkling in the sunshine.

As she looked out at it she thought of her mother’s frail shoulders, the grey hairs in her chignon and the sewing-machine wheel in the semi-twilight of the room at early evening, when the sun was only an afterglow on the façades opposite. After the lady left they had eaten, without speaking much, as usual.

‘Well, that is one way,’ her mother had said as they washed up. The summer could seem so long in town.

A powerfully built man in a light suit and straw hat met her at the station. He picked up her suitcase and carried it out to a large open-topped car. She noticed he was wearing driving gloves of pale-coloured leather.

He had built the holiday cottage after the earlier war, when he had been appointed a consultant surgeon. He and his wife had never had children, but for a number of years they asked their nephew to stay every summer in the red-painted wooden house by the North Sea. They might have invited the dressmaker’s daughter on holiday to keep him company, the lanky fourteen-year-old boy who lay on his stomach in a sand dune watching the car stop in front of the house and the strange girl getting out. The consultant held the door for her, his straw hat in his hand, like a hotel porter, with the afternoon sun shining on his bald pate.

She was broad-shouldered and had long arms and strong legs. She looked like a swimmer. Her summer dress was blue, she had bare shoulders and loose flaxen hair, which flew out behind her when she walked in the wind and the sunshine which made the marram grass glisten and sparkle. Her cheekbones were broad and her eyes blue, but he didn’t notice that until later, when he came down from his dune.

Her arrival had been announced a week earlier. He might already have had a presentiment of what it would feel like, the first time her blue eyes rested on him, briefly and expressionlessly. They had sat down to dinner and she replied to the questions they asked her about her journey and about herself, just as expressionlessly, but politely. He didn’t allow himself to look at the new arrival for more than a few seconds at a time. If he had known how she saw him it would have confirmed his worst forebodings.

She thought he looked funny with his bony body, close-set eyes and the wiry hair that constantly fell over his forehead even though he tried to comb it back with water. He hadn’t had much to do with girls yet, hardly anything in fact. He couldn’t look at them without feeling doomed. But they must have overcome their embarrassed silence, the young woman and the overgrown boy. A couple of years’ difference can be enough to decide which words to use. Woman. Boy.

When they were older they couldn’t remember what they had talked about that summer. They probably told each other what they had managed to experience, considering how young they were. Perhaps they also discussed what they imagined might happen to them when they grew up and the war was over. The conversations beside the sea had faded out and the words been forgotten. Only the sea and the beach remained, and the recollection by one of them that they had once walked together on the far side of all the years that would pass before they met again. But they could both remember lying on the beach and swimming together when the breakers were not too fierce. His aunt warned them again and again of the undertow. He was a good swimmer, in the water they were equals, but when they came out onto the beach he was again aware she was older than he was.

Many years later he told her he had suspected she had been friendly towards him only because in her eyes he was harmless, and then because he was her hosts’ nephew. She smiled when he said that but made no reply, and he came to think of the way she smiled and her expression that grew more preoccupied during the short time they spent together. She seemed so pensive when they walked beside the waves or sat on the beach playing with the sand that trickled between their fingers, until someone called her from the house.

There was no question of duties, come to that. It had been her own idea to lend a hand in the kitchen. The housekeeper was an elderly woman with thin lips and big hands. The consultant’s wife had actually taken the girl aside and said she must remember she was a guest. She had replied that she didn’t mind helping. She joined in preparing dinner and serving it before she sat down in her place at table and the housekeeper withdrew to the kitchen. Then she hastened to spread her napkin on her lap like the others. She was given her own silver napkin ring like theirs. They used the same napkins for several days before they were changed and washed and hung out to dry on the clothes-line behind the house among sheets and shirts.

She loved to sniff in the scent of clean linen that had hung on the line in the wind. Once he saw her, lost in meditation as she could be, engaged in taking in the laundry. She stood there behind the house with her face buried in a sheet. She saw him looking at her and he saw her cheeks blush slightly. He lowered his own eyes, but it had been strangely exciting to feel the unexpected power of his glance.

Perhaps he even confused it with the feeling of having stolen something from her, something he could take away with him and keep, one evening when she hadn’t bothered to close the bathroom window. She couldn’t see him out there in the twilight, herself white and indistinct in the dark bathroom, lifting her large, soft breasts gently and intimately to dry underneath them with her towel. Later, when the wet towel hung flapping by itself on the empty clothes-line, he couldn’t resist holding it up to his face. But then he only felt powerless again, and dropped it at once, afraid of being seen from inside the house.

She didn’t see him. When he was not present she did not think of him. She only saw him if he was actually there, but not because she wanted him to be there. She just didn’t give him a thought. Later on she could not remember what she had thought about during the weeks before her sudden departure, in the strange house in company with strange people she had not herself chosen to spend summer with. She could remember lying awake at night, and often thinking about her mother without actually missing her. She thought about the woman who happened to be her mother, and about the cramped, dark flat near the harbour that was her home.

She heard the bombers flying over Denmark and imagined them flying above the city and dropping their cargo. Perhaps one of the bombs would hit the block they lived in, and crash down through the living-room ceiling. Her mother would be sitting in the shelter down in the cellar as the bomb hit their home and the rest of the block and brought it crashing down in a cloud of rubble. They had been in the shelter several times with the other residents on the staircase when there was an air-raid warning. Some of them had been in night clothes and dressing gowns. Nothing had ever happened. The war went on somewhere else, far out behind the black-out curtains. It consisted of sounds, voices on the wireless and rumours in the street, sirens from the rooftops and the distant drone of the aircraft engines approaching from out at sea.

They must have cycled out more than once to the half-submerged meadows at the end of the fjord. He had often been there alone, both that summer and in earlier ones. The horizon ran almost full circle, broken only by a spruce plantation to the south, scattered clumps of reeds and the sand dunes to the west. Furthest out on an isthmus there was a wooden shed made of grooved planks. You had to leave the bicycles and continue on foot for the last stretch along the water-logged strips of earth. He showed her how you could get right out to the shed by taking a detour. It stood out like a solitary figure surrounded by cloud masses and their gliding reflections in the calm water, a distance so far it was hard to understand how anyone could have transported the long planks so far out or thought of building a shed out there at all.

When you turned round you could see nothing but water, grass and sky, where the meadows blended into the fjord. They stood quite still listening to the wind and the birds. There were narrow chinks between the planks of the shed, which dispersed the light into transparent fans. If you put your eye to the chinks you could look out. She was standing like that, with her eye to the crack between two planks, when he walked over to her and placed a timid hand on her back, just above the small of it. Later he could not comprehend how he’d had the courage. She had turned and thrown him a brief glance of surprised amusement before she pressed a forefinger to his nose and went outside.

She overtook him as they cycled back along the narrow path with flooded grass on both sides. Her frock tightened around her hips when she trod down on the pedals and her smooth calves shone in the sun. She had a large birthmark at the back of one knee, you could see it every time she stretched her leg. It seemed like a blemish, but at the same time it drew all his attention to the fleeting glimpses he had of the backs of her knees when they came in sight by turns beneath her fluttering skirts. He felt he had to get in front again, after all he was the one who knew the place, and he rode up beside her. She cried out, there wasn’t room for two bicycles on the path and next moment he lost his balance. There was nothing in the least spiteful or malicious about her laughter. She merely laughed as he stood up, soaking wet and covered with mud. She laughed in the way he imagined a sister might have done.

He was aware of her every movement around the house. He listened for her steps on the stairs and the door of her room when it was closed, cautiously, he felt. It would be wrong to say she avoided him, but neither did she seek him out. Certainly it occurred to him that she might only have gone for walks on the beach or bicycle rides with him because she was a guest in the house. A guest who compensated for the hospitality she enjoyed by peeling potatoes and hanging up the washing and on the whole making as little noise as possible, and who thus saw it as one of her duties to keep him company. But that might just as well have been something he merely imagined.

She was consistently friendly, even after the afternoon in the shed out there in the water meadows, maybe a touch more detached, maybe not even that. She was so reserved and polite, both to him and to his uncle and aunt. He thought she hid herself behind her smile and her modesty, her readiness to help with domestic tasks and her efforts to sit nicely at table. At the beginning he had noticed her several times propping her knife and fork against the edge of her plate. She had pulled herself up and put them correctly on the plate itself when she saw his aunt’s slightly forced smile. He knew almost nothing about her. She had not told him anything except quite ordinary things about herself and that made her all the more baffling.

One late afternoon when she was down in the kitchen he went into her room. He looked at the things lying around, a young woman’s belongings and clothes, nothing special. He caught sight of himself in the spotted mirror above the wash basin, where the evening sun shone dimly and metallically around a dark, obscure figure without a face.

It might have been that night they heard the English planes again. The depressing, uniform drone was suddenly interrupted by a snarl that increased in strength and was abruptly silenced, to be followed shortly afterwards by a muffled crash like distant thunder.

Early next morning he went out again to sit in the nearest sand dune and observe her through the open bathroom window. He had just woken up when he heard her bare feet on the varnished stairs. He sneaked round the other side of the house after eventually plucking up courage, if it was courage that drove him, and not something else even stronger than his timidity. The sun had just risen above the roof and he had to shade his eyes with a hand. Suddenly she bent forward, her breasts hanging heavily for a moment beneath her forward-leaning torso. The window was closed with a bang.

He went down onto the beach. When he came back her bicycle had disappeared. He tried to picture what it would be like when she came back and he had to look her in the eye. If he left her to herself and was merely passive when she returned, it would seem like an admission that he had spied on her. He would have to find her and somehow convince her that it had been nothing like that, in fact. That it was a case of misunderstanding, a chance, unfortunate coincidence that he had been sitting in the marram grass when she happened to be in the bathroom. He had to do something, because even if he made things worse that would be better than doing nothing.

The thought struck him that she might have gone out to the meadows. He was through the plantation and on the other side of it when he saw her walking towards him, far away out there. He hid himself in the murk of the close-set pines until she had cycled past. A sunlit, unapproachable, energetic figure on the sunken road leading to the village. She was up in her room when he got home.

Later on, when they were at the breakfast table, she seemed her usual self, smiling in her nicely behaved manner. And perhaps nothing out of the way had happened, after all . . . His uncle reported hearing that an English aircraft had crashed somewhere to the north, near the sea. There was a photograph, taken on the same or one of the following days by a local photographer. A German soldier stood guard over the wrecked plane, you could glimpse the twisted iron struts that had braced the glass cage of the cockpit, and a piece of the wing with a double, dotted and dashed line, bent and broken, where the plates had been riveted together. On the wing were two concentric painted circles: the emblem of the Royal Air Force.

The consultant asked them if they had heard it. He himself had been woken up by the sound. The girl did not react but listened attentively to him, recounting the villagers’ description of it. She kept to herself that day, but maybe it was only because he dared not go near her. Maybe everything would have been normal if he had dared. At dinner the consultant told them that a parachute had been found drifting out in the fjord.

She went up to her room earlier than usual. When he too had gone to bed he lay listening as usual to the creaking of her bedsprings as they sank under her weight. He expected her to brush the timber wall with a toe, an elbow or a knee, as if to touch him. His aunt was still downstairs listening to the radio. In the silence he could hear the muffled music. He pictured the girl’s body beside him in the darkness on the other side of the wall, so close that he could reach out and touch her.

She lies awake listening in the silence. She listens to the woodwork relaxing after being warmed by the sun, the squeaking tap and running water in the room on the other side of the corridor, where the consultant is cleaning his teeth. Then he too goes to bed. The housekeeper has already retired for the night but the lady of the house is still down in the sitting room with the wireless set, under the lamp that sheds its light in vain on the matt black-out curtain, as if the window looks out onto a mountain wall.

The muffled dance music penetrates through ceiling and wall timbers to the young woman lying in the dark listening. Cool lingering music, like the breeze from the open window, she thinks, and visualises the mature woman, in the dark crimson armchair, her hands on its arms, gazing at the woven panel of the loudspeaker. She wears a white blouse and a long, pleated skirt and silk stockings, as if dressed for town. As if she had just come home after an evening at a restaurant where you can dance to an orchestra playing that kind of music.

The two women listen to the softly flowing strings and saxophones playing for whoever is awake at this hour around the blacked-out land. They listen to the same music, but the older woman thinks she is listening alone. That she is the only one picturing a dance floor in town, brilliantly lit, with gliding figures, the men in dark clothes, the women with sparkling necklaces, in long dresses that swing around them like flower-heads, fans or wings.

The girl waits for the music to die down. Then she listens for the other woman’s steps, the sound of running water in the bathroom pipes and the long silence before her hostess finally comes upstairs and gently opens and closes the door of her room. The consultant and his wife have separate rooms. The girl waits for a while longer, after the silence is no longer disturbed by anything except the slight rattling of the black-out curtain in the breeze from the open window. Probably half an hour passes, perhaps the best part of an hour, before she dares leave her bed, cautiously, as she braces her arms against the springs to quieten them and not give herself away. She gets dressed in the dark and slowly presses down the latch so she can open the door soundlessly. She knows which of the stair treads creak.

While she helped prepare the evening meal she secretly filled a basket and hid it in the woodshed. The key of the kitchen door clicks slightly. She stands and waits before slowly pushing the door open. It sticks a bit and she barely closes it after her, without pushing down the handle. She has left her bicycle a little way away from the house. No one will be able to hear her when she mounts it and cycles out onto the road.

It is a clear, light night and she has no trouble finding her way through the blue landscape. Only when she rides through the plantation does it get so dark she can barely see the track. She has to look up and follow the opening between the topmost branches of the pines where the sky makes a blue path in the blackness with a slim moon and a few stars. Like a watercourse, she thinks, running into the sea, when she comes out into the open again and goes on along the path surrounded by flooded grass. Soon she can clearly distinguish the shed out there beneath the sharp edge of the moon, floating likewise in all the blue.