The Faces Read online

  ‘No, I’m not. Goodbye, Søren. Won’t you give me a kiss?’

  She leaned down and kissed him on the mouth. He put his arms around her neck, and a smell of interrupted sleep, of school dust and childish guilt, fell over both of them for a moment like a protective cape wrapped mercifully around a fallen foe. She held him by the shoulders and, full of dark sympathy, regarded the exhausted little face.

  ‘You need a haircut,’ she said with false cheerfulness and stroked his blond, silky hair.

  ‘No,’ he said vehemently and wriggled out of her hands. ‘Gitte says that long hair looks good on me. The other kids laugh at me when I’ve been to the barber.’

  ‘I see.’

  She straightened up quickly, and at the same moment Gitte stepped in between them. She took the little boy by the wrist.

  ‘Get going,’ she said with authority. ‘It’s two minutes to eight.’

  She strode through the room with the expression of someone who has a goal in life, and stopped as suddenly as a car that brakes before an unexpected roadblock. She picked up the bottle of pills and stared at Lise with an expression of moral intensity in her nearsighted eyes.

  ‘Gert has asked me to keep them,’ she said, ‘This thing with Grete has given him a shock. He doesn’t ever want to go through that again.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lise and sat down on the bed with a feeling of transparency, as if she were clipped out of paper. ‘Did he tell you about that?’

  ‘It’s your own fault.’

  Gitte stuck the bottle carelessly in the pocket of her jeans and sat down next to her. She was fascinatingly ugly, and she smelled of sweat. Lise smiled broadly. Fear filled the room like a liquid. The clock in the dining room struck eight.

  ‘He came in to my room looking for comfort last night. He wanted to make up, Lise. He was ready to come back to you, he wanted to give up all thought of being unfaithful to you. He wanted to go to bed with you. But you were too tired, you wanted to sleep, you didn’t understand a thing.’

  Her voice resounded with bursting impatience. She put her elbows on her knees and rested her face in the cradle of her hands.

  ‘Gitte,’ said Lise, ‘don’t I get any morning coffee?’

  ‘Oh God, yes. Then we can talk.’

  Lise took off her bathrobe and crept down under the comforter again. There was no more sleep to be found in its familiar folds. Nadia, she thought, I’ll call her today. She leaned toward the gentle, unwavering image that Nadia had of her. Nadia found her to be impressively tolerant, but she mistook tolerance for indifference. To be intolerant you had to be involved. Candor, she thought, that’s all that Gitte is asking for right now, a little corner of my soul, an expression of something human. Then one more day would pass before the hatred broke loose.

  ‘Now eat something, you need it, I’ve just baked some bread.’

  Gitte placed herself in the chair where Gert had sat during the night, and she poured coffee into two cups.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she said earnestly, ‘that it was awful for him. He had to call the police and an ambulance, and he was questioned like a criminal.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. But it’s as if it happened to someone I don’t know anymore, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do, but you missed the right moment. And then he came in to see me, but I’m only a substitute for you, like so many things are. He said that it had all just been revenge against you.’

  ‘What have I ever done to him?’

  Lise stirred her coffee while she saw her daughter Hanne’s closed, enigmatic face in front of her. Whenever she went past Hanne – they had avoided touching each other for a long time – she noticed the smell of warm milk and wet rubber boots from her own childhood and knew, full of dark guilt, that Hanne’s own nostrils were filled with a completely different smell that her maternal senses were too full of memory to pick up. And Hanne’s face trembled and blew away in a terrible state of non-being between the abandoned face of yesterday and the one she would wear tomorrow. When you took everything into consideration, she thought, it wasn’t strange that in the evening, when he was deeply preoccupied with other things, Gert had acquired animal ears – after all, wasn’t it common to see a dog staring at you through the eyes of a close relative? In such cases, you had to pretend tactfully that there was nothing unusual, and take down all the mirrors in the house until the mistake was corrected. If you made those around you aware of this kind of negligence and oversight, you would expose their vulnerability and arouse their anger, just as if you openly informed a tuxedo-clad gentleman at a party that he had forgotten to button his trousers.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Gitte, ‘you haven’t done anything to him. It’s like in Strindberg. All his characters – they hate each other for no reason.’

  ‘Because they stay together, even though the love is gone,’ said Lise slyly, as she eased Gitte onto the old, safe track. ‘Because you can’t love just one person and forget all the rest of humanity.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why,’ said Gitte, satisfied. ‘Love your neighbor – the other way is totally anti-social. That’s why I don’t feel sorry for Grete either. It was an egotistical act.’

  She sniffed as if she had a stuffy nose; exhausted, Lise felt that this time the danger had passed.

  ‘Some of the things you learned in junior college were OK,’ she said with a feeling of sick gratitude.

  ‘That’s right.’ Gitte stood up and collected the dishes on the tray. ‘The family has died out. We don’t want to get married or bring children into the world either. But if you’ve done it, the way you and Gert did, you have to stay together. We don’t care for divorces. You should have taken him in last night. That would have been smart.’

  The last remark came breathlessly, as she pressed down the door handle with her elbow.

  Lise got out of bed and opened the door to her study. She took a deep breath and stared at her typewriter standing there dusty and untouched, sprawling accusingly on the desk, which was in the kind of depressing order that results when no one ever does any work at it. There was a neat stack of her award-winning book. It was called The Deviant. It was about a sex criminal. Suspicion was directed at a poor bachelor who was afraid of women and who invited the little girls in the neighborhood down to his basement shop for soda pop and cookies. The murderer was the homicide detective who was the most zealous during the investigation. The resolution had come as a surprise even to her. After she had created her characters, they decided for themselves what they wanted to do. Writing had always been like a game, a pleasant task that allowed her to forget everything else in the world. She thought: If I start to write again, this whole nightmare will be over. Hanne had come running home from school every day. ‘Have you written a new chapter, Mother?’ she would ask excitedly. And she would read it with shining eyes. ‘Oh, this is so good. I can’t wait for the next part.’

  Hanne ran in and out of her mind like a ray of sunlight in a darkened room. The first child, the miracle, a girl. All her books were written for Hanne: fairy tales, short stories for little children, short novels about a childish girl’s fantasy world. It had astonished her that she could give birth to boys. She had been disappointed and had then resigned herself to it. Gitte said that both Mogens and Søren knew that she had wanted girls. Gitte gave them the love Lise had denied them. Lise was fond of them, but they knew, said Gitte, that she loved Hanne more than them.

  She lifted one of the books in her hand. The dust jacket was brilliantly colored and dramatic. Gitte had read the book in junior college. The whole LSD clique had been enthusiastic about it. They saw it as a revolt against the authorities, a weapon in their fight against conformity and those in power. Gitte had read her ad for a housekeeper and grabbed it like a drowning person grabs the rescue plank. She wanted to escape her addiction because she could see where it was leading. She wanted to be healthy and independent and serve an artist, for only in art were you a free person, raised above the deadliness that created all the unhappiness in the world.

  She sat down at the desk in her modest cotton nightgown, with her bare feet on the cold parquet floor. She hadn’t been alone with Hanne for a long time. She didn’t know who was preventing her from this. No doubt it was just difficult to be alone with someone in an apartment that housed six people.

  ‘I’m scared,’ she whispered aloud. Why had he told Gitte about the suicide? What was it that was getting closer day by day, as inescapable as time? She saw Gert’s big, furry ears be- fore her and knew that she must not tell anyone about it. And she saw the dead woman. How many pills did it take? Fifty – a hundred? Gitte had taken them away. But she would have to give Lise two every evening or she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She gave all of them something that they couldn’t do without. She went to bed with Gert; she went to bed with Mogens; she gave Søren desserts with whipped cream; but what did she really give to Hanne? Hanne treated her with a kind of guarded reserve, and Lise couldn’t figure out why.

  She pulled herself together and went out to the bathroom. The hot water in the bathtub caressed her gently, and she heard Gert come out of his room and call Gitte. He wanted coffee and at 10 he was going over to the ministry. Had he really wanted to sleep with her last night? But that had become just as impossible as if an ocean separated them. Gitte said that all men had some kind of perversity. At the junior college, in the course of six months, she had slept with 49 men, and none of them had been normal. One man could only do it if he was wearing rubber boots. Another one got off on hitting her hard in the face. Gert wanted to have his nipples pinched, and Lise had been married to him for ten years without finding that out. You had to dig in with your nails, said Gitte, then he would come with wild ecstasy.

  There was a rushing in the hot-water pipe that ran along the edge of the bathtub. Someone was apparently taking a bath upstairs. Gitte almost never took baths. She had a black line under her chin because she would just rub the sponge across her face. Dirt was part of her view of life. You have to remember, she said, that penicillin is made from mold.

  The rushing noise in the pipe continued, and suddenly there was the sound of triumphant laughter. She rinsed off the soap from her armpits and stared at the rusty pipe, which ended at the grating under the tiles. A different pipe extended from the ceiling to the floor and connected the apartments to each other. When Gitte pressed her ear to her radiator, she could hear what they were saying down below. It was a basement apartment where an old deaf woman lived with her two middle-aged children. Right in front of her they would discuss when she was going to die, because she had purchased some life insurance with them as beneficiaries. The laughter grew louder and louder, and Lise stared at the water pipe as if it were a cupboard from her childhood, containing something horrible that would come darting out when sleep and darkness had overwhelmed her. Someone was talking to someone else, interrupted by fits of laughter. It sounded like Mogens talking through the nylon stocking he pulled over his head when he wanted to scare his little brother. She took off her shower cap and pressed her ear against the pipe.

  ‘It’s worse when she smiles. Her front teeth are the wrong color.’

  She touched her two porcelain crowns with her finger and heard Gitte’s voice again:

  ‘She only sees things that you can touch or hold.’

  ‘We’ll manage to break her if we’re patient. Leave the pills on your dresser. Then one day she’ll take them, just like Grete. She’s already thinking about it.’

  That was Gert’s voice.

  Anger made the blood race hotly through Lise’s body. She got up out of the bathtub and pulled on her bathrobe without drying off. In the kitchen Gitte was pouring water into a coffee filter. Gert was standing next to her with his hands in the pockets of his blue bathrobe.

  ‘I can hear everything you say,’ Lise said sharply. ‘But you’d better be careful. I’ve got friends too. I’ll tell them what’s going on in this house.’

  They both stared at her with well-feigned astonishment.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ asked Gert.

  ‘You know very well what I mean.’

  She gathered her bathrobe at her throat with a shaking hand.

  ‘You must have fallen asleep in the bathtub,’ said Gitte calmly as she continued making coffee. ‘I know how that is. You’re totally confused when you wake up.’

  The anger disappeared like water that dripped onto the floor and formed a little puddle at her feet. Doubt and confusion took its place.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she asked. ‘I thought I could hear your voices through the hot-water pipe.’

  ‘What did we say?’ Gert smiled at her and sat down at the kitchen table. Deep in his eyes flickered a malicious little flame.

  ‘Nothing special,’ she said slowly. ‘I can’t really remember. I probably did fall asleep.’

  She took a glass out of the cupboard and went over to the sink to get some water. The door to Gitte’s room was open, as usual. It was a declaration that she had no private life, that you could enter her room as freely as you did the rest of the apartment. Lise stared through the open door, and it was as if a wet rag were twisting around her heart.

  The sleeping pills were on the dresser.

  She turned around quickly to face them while she drank the water. She thought they were avoiding her glance.

  ‘I was thinking of inviting Nadia to lunch today,’ she said in a light tone of voice. ‘I haven’t talked to her for such a long time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gitte as she sat down at the table across from Gert, ‘you do need to see some other people besides us.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Gert turned a page of his newspaper. ‘You get a little strange if you isolate yourself too much.’

  They both smiled kindly and reassuringly at her like a couple of parents who think it’s about time for their teenage daughter to go out a little and have some fun.

  3

  Later in the morning the light had already grown old. It had a yellowed, withered cast to it, like fading snapshots left in a drawer that no one opens anymore. The sun was hidden behind gray, floating clouds, and the sky gave off a flat, stale smell like the breath of people who don’t eat.

  Lise closed the window. Out on the wide boulevard the cars were driving along, without the least thought of each other. The man from the warehouse below the living room was standing there arguing with a truck driver whose vehicle had stopped the traffic for a moment. He threw up his hands in excitement and looked like a person who, for the first time in his life, was confronted with a selfishness greater than his own. Maybe all this had happened millennia ago, the way that light from long-dead stars reaches the earth.

  She sat down again at the low enameled table between the two London sofas and continued her meticulous manicure. She had lost Asger because of her nails. Shortly after he was appointed to the Foreign Ministry as the Minister’s right-hand man, they had been invited to a government dinner. With Nadia’s help she had picked out a new evening gown, which had cost a small fortune, and had gone through a beauty treatment that changed her so much that her own mother wouldn’t have recognized her. Her face stiff with makeup, she had carried on an exhausting conversation with the gentleman seated next to her, a member of Parliament who had recently had a cerebral hemorrhage. ‘Have you actually written something since Princess Sibyl?’ he babbled. He mistook her for the wife of a counselor at the Foreign Ministry, who had really only written that one book. She had endured many hours of suffering only to hear that remark.

  The dinner was over by eleven, and it had been filled with the same inconsolable endlessness as her childhood Sundays. ‘I was so ashamed,’ said Asger when they got home, ‘about your nails. I noticed them during coffee. You probably don’t realize it, but a man can’t make a career as a diplomat if he has a wife who doesn’t bother to clean her fingernails.’

  At the beauty salon they hadn’t been able to remove completely the traces of her intimate relationship with carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. If they had been able to, maybe she would still be married to him. Life consisted of a series of minute, imperceptible events, and you could lose control if you overlooked a single one of them.

  She waved her hands to make the nail polish dry. Through the open French door she saw Gitte moving along the bookshelves in her study. Every day she sniffed at the books the same way a dog sniffs at trees and stones to find the smells that will prompt him to lift his leg. With self-assured instinct and exquisite economy Gitte greedily sucked in the juice and spat out the peels. Rilke, Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf – they were hers, and Gitte had no intention of letting them go again now that she had discovered what they were all about. She sipped at them fastidiously, let them slide over her tongue like a confident wine connoisseur, tore them out of context and drenched them with her shameless understanding.

  She stood there, thin and bent as a question mark, as she pulled out a book from one of the lower shelves. She stood there a little too long, like a marionette whose string you’ve forgotten to pull. You have to watch over them all the time, thought Lise, full of anxiety, and make them play their roles: one step forward, two to the side, and a little clap with the puppet hands. They noticed if you neglected them for a moment and thought your own thoughts, which were dangerous and different and threatened their whole borrowed existence. Then they would take revenge and start to live for themselves, just as that unknown woman, Grete, had done.

  Quickly she slipped in under Gitte’s skin, which was slovenly and badly stitched together because there had been too many people working on it.

  ‘Gitte,’ she said in that cajoling tone of voice you use with children who refuse to eat, ‘don’t you think Hanne’s dress would fit you, the pleated blue one? She’s grown out of it and I think it would look good on you.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Gitte, ‘I’d love to have it.’

  Her skinny body unfolded like a jackknife and she looked happy – as if there were nothing wrong – with the sudden, simple joy of a young girl at an unexpected gift. Lise recalled what it meant to be poor. You would skip a meal so you could buy a book you’d wanted for a long time. It was a catastrophe if you got a run in your only pair of stockings. You walked from one end of town to the other to save the streetcar fare. Poverty clung to you like an unpleasant odor.