The Faces Page 3

  Lise’s award-winning book had been translated into eleven languages, but she felt that affluence paralyzed her just as much as poverty once had.

  ‘Lolita,’ said Gitte, lifting the book triumphantly in her hand. ‘I haven’t read it since I was in the orphanage. We read it in secret, as if it were pornographic.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lise as her courage sank within her like sand in an hourglass. ‘The most touching thing about it is his empathy with the girl. He sees her loneliness, he knows that he is separating her from all of her friends.’

  She pulled her upper lip down so it covered her teeth, which Gitte found so repulsive, because she thought there was something about every face that offended and challenged the world in the same way as a doctor’s illegible handwriting offends the self-esteem of the pharmacist.

  She allowed a quiet, disheartened thought to slip in between the pages of the book. It fell out again and hung onto the edge of the dust jacket for a moment, before it dripped toward the floor like a tear from her eyelashes. The book was Gitte’s, as if this was the only copy in the whole world and there was only one possible interpretation of it.

  ‘I read an article by Simone de Beauvoir in some magazine the other day,’ said Gitte as she sat down on the arm of the sofa; an expression of simple complacency slid over her face. ‘It was called the Lolita Syndrome. She says that immature, infantile men are behind it. They think that grownup women can see right through them. Gert is infantile too. He doesn’t want an equal partner. It reassures him that, when all is said and done, I’m just his housekeeper.’

  Gitte’s legs were dangling loosely and insolently like the legs of a ventriloquist’s dummy who has taken control from her owner and is expressing his most secret thoughts before a cheering auditorium. Gleeful laughter slipped free from her tightly closed lips, and she had grown so clever, Lise noticed with a sidelong, stolen glance, that her larynx wasn’t moving at all.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and continued quickly, diverting attention, postponing the inevitable for a moment longer. ‘Make a few sandwiches for Nadia and me. And please let us be alone. She canceled a patient in order to visit me. She only has about an hour and a half.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it, no problem.’

  Gitte jumped up and stood for a moment in front of her, while a glimmer of cruel mirth showed in her green, close-set eyes, above which her eyebrows grew together like a couple of girlfriends who can’t tear themselves away from each other.

  ‘It’ll be good for you,’ Gitte said meaningfully, ‘to talk to a sensible person. Gert doesn’t think you’re very well. He was really alarmed when you came into the kitchen this morning. You have to watch out not to mix up dream and reality.’

  Lise stared at her narrow back as she left the room. There was a quivering in the air like the stripes you see before your eyes after a sleepless night – a thought torn loose from her self which she could no longer call back.

  * * *

  ‘You don’t really think that Gert and Gitte want you to kill yourself like Grete did, do you?’ said Nadia with her mouth full of food, giving her a slow, piercing look as if she were an untrained stenographer.

  Her gentle, heavy Slavic face suddenly collapsed into a turkey-like wattle under her chin, as if seeking refuge there for a moment, incapable of keeping itself in place any longer. So that it wouldn’t completely slide off – they had always supported each other in hard times – Lise said quickly, ‘No, Nadia, I don’t think so.’

  Lise grasped for what people call ‘common sense’, which she possessed as if it were an artificial language with a few, crude words that could only be used to exchange remarks about the weather, the evening meal, or the train schedule.

  ‘I know full well,’ she babbled on, ‘that for Gert she’s just someone who is easy and close at hand. He doesn’t have to mobilize any emotional apparatus to go to bed with her, that’s all it is. And she doesn’t dream about love or marriage. In fact, I think you’re right, that I was just out of it for a minute in the bathtub, and then my imagination ran away with me. You know I’ve always daydreamed about writing a horror story for adults. Hanne’s seventeen, and she’s through with children’s books.’

  ‘That’s right. How is she? I haven’t seen her in ages.’

  Nadia’s face slid back into place, and her eyes were so pure and shining, as if they had just come from the cleaners. She had always been neat and meticulous with her things, and nothing in her possession was ever allowed to decay.

  ‘Fine. But there still don’t seem to be any boys in her life. And she’s old enough for it, you know.’

  ‘It’ll come. She’s always been a family girl.’

  Nadia took a gulp of her beer while her eyes grew long and narrow like wet watercolors that are about to run into each other. It gave her face a cunning, shifty expression. Lise would have liked to know what Gitte had said to Nadia when she let her in. She stared at her friend as a feeling of total desolation slipped through her, as if she were drifting away on an ice floe without a single living person hearing her cries for help. She searched behind many secret veils for Nadia’s face from twenty years ago, when they would meet each other at the Royal Library, where so many young girls go to escape the homes that have become too confining for them, like last year’s dress. Nadia had shared her circle of friends with her, and since nothing was holding her back, she had slipped in, as if into a ballroom that was decorated for someone else, just as all the presents she had given Hanne had always been meant for some other child. Nadia’s friends were students from the provinces, and one of them was Asger. If she hadn’t met Nadia, she might have married a mechanic and lived in Nørrebro, a few blocks from her childhood home.

  A deafening noise broke the silence so abruptly that Nadia dropped her fork on the floor in fright. She stared at the door to the dining room.

  ‘What in God’s name is that?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s Gitte. She’s put on a record,’ Lise replied indifferently. ‘She and Mogens can’t live without loud noise. He must have come home early from school.’

  ‘Why don’t you throw her out?’ asked Nadia point-blank. ‘You can’t stand her.’

  ‘She gives me sleeping pills,’ said Lise guardedly. ‘And it’s not true that I can’t stand her.’

  She raised her voice to drown out the noise, and fear swooped down on her again like hawk wings over a chicken yard.

  ‘She’s very intelligent; it’s amazing how many books she’s read. And she’s fond of me, as if I were her mother.’

  Her heart was pounding violently as she fixed her gaze on Nadia’s face so that it wouldn’t float away again.

  ‘You can get sleeping pills from any doctor,’ said Nadia slowly, ‘if you need them. You shouldn’t make yourself dependent on Gitte that way. It would be much better for you if you were still able to feel jealousy.’

  ‘Dr Jørgensen removed that feeling from me,’ Lise explained in a tone of voice as if they were talking about a ruptured appendix.

  ‘Yes, but there’s something unnatural about that. By the way, you should go see him again. I think you need it. To be perfectly honest, you don’t seem as though you’re very well.’

  Those were the words Gitte had used. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The danger was approaching from many directions at once, and she couldn’t imagine what it was all about.

  Nadia stood up and brushed off the crumbs from her smooth skirt.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘It was nice to see you. Every time I’ve called lately, Gitte has kept me away, as if there were a corpse in the house. She said you were working and must not be disturbed.’

  ‘That’s a lie,’ said Lise as they both went over to the door. ‘But for some reason she didn’t have anything against your coming over today.’

  In an impulsive gesture, Nadia gave her a hug and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Promise me,’ she said earnestly, ‘that you’ll talk to Dr Jørgensen one of these days. He has helped you before, and you know that he’s your friend.’

  Out in the dining room Gitte and Mogens were performing a wriggling dance in time to the music. They let go of each other and Mogens gave his mother a hostile look.

  ‘Gitte and I,’ he said, ‘are going to the demonstration at the American Embassy against the war in Vietnam.’

  ‘Then stay on the outskirts,’ said Nadia cheerfully, ‘or you’re liable to get a club in the head. Aren’t you going to say hello to your old Aunt Nadia?’

  ‘Hi,’ he said curtly and slouched out to the long hallway to the kitchen, followed by Gitte, who moved with affected youthfulness, as if she were twenty and not four years older than him.

  Lise watched Nadia as she put on her coat in front of the mirror in the small, dark entryway. Maybe she could rely on her, maybe she really knew nothing about any of it.

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Nadia, smiling to herself in the mirror, ‘how he still has his father’s face.’

  ‘Funny?’

  Lise stared at her suspiciously, and suddenly Nadia was too big for the room, like the china doll from her childhood that she had put into the little cardboard theater her father had pasted together from a pattern in Family Journal. But people just said things like that out of the blue, she thought with horror, without giving a thought to the incredible difficulties involved in sharing your face with someone else. They couldn’t both use it at the same time, and Lise didn’t know – since children kept those kinds of things to themselves – what kind of complicated agreement had been reached between father and son. A Section Chief has a great need for his face, and it must not bear visible traces of the nightly dreams and secret excesses of an adolescent boy. And when it was Mogens’s turn to wear it, the face was ravaged with adult worries and lack of sleep, and he had to stretch it and smooth out wrinkles before he put it on in the morning, before he went to school.

  ‘Goodbye, Lise,’ said Nadia somberly. ‘Take good care of yourself, OK? And keep away from those stupid pills. You can sleep just fine without them.’

  Lise stood there for a minute looking at the closed door after Nadia had left. Her thoughts fumbled for Dr Jørgensen’s face as if she were rummaging in a drawer for something she hadn’t used in a long time. She found it underneath a lot of other faces and stared at it, terrified. It was long and flat and endless, like an illustration of the theorem that two parallel lines never intersect. It was overwhelming, and she let go of it again as she went into the dining room and turned off the record player.

  4

  ‘Once upon a time there was an old woman who was a very evil witch. She had two daughters; one was ugly and mean, but that’s the one she loved, for she was her very own daughter. The other was beautiful and good, but that’s the one she hated, for she was her stepdaughter…’

  ‘The ugly one is Hanne, and the beautiful one is Gitte.’

  ‘So I’m the evil witch?’

  Lise pressed Søren closer to her and, smiling, gazed into his little face, which was suddenly much older than his seven years. He had used it up too quickly and had to put on a future face, because there was no one to parcel out the children’s treasury of time for them – even though you would never think of giving them all the licorice at once that was meant to last their entire childhood. Gert always said with naive pride that the boy was advanced for his age, without thinking further about what terrible consequences that sentence contained.

  ‘Yes, you’re the witch.’

  He laughed, teasing her, and looking at her with that guileless lack of empathy that only children can manage.

  She continued reading from the rare edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, which she had bought during her happy period, running from one antiquarian bookstore to another to find it. She read without comprehending the words. Søren lay back against the pillow. His mouth smelled faintly of supper, because Gitte said you got holes in your teeth by brushing them. There was a rushing sound in her ears again. It had been going on all afternoon, ever since Nadia had left. But when she stepped into Søren’s messy room, it had stopped. It came back when he mentioned Gitte’s name, which always lay on his lips like drops of saliva. It came back and reminded her of the bathroom with the long, twisting, mysterious pipes, whose function only plumbers knew anything about. On the other hand, she knew nothing about plumbers, and she thought about Rapunzel from her childhood, the girl downstairs with the golden braids, the girl whom a drunken old plumber had gotten pregnant when she was fifteen years old. She had hated him because he took away a beautiful dream from her. Now he was taking revenge with this rushing sound in her ears. A doctor could cure noises in the ears; he was a better plumber than that other one. But it made it difficult to distinguish their voices from each other, as if she had suddenly become slightly deaf.

  She finished the fairy tale and discovered that Søren had fallen asleep. It always happened so abruptly, like the click of a shutter in a camera. He slept, and she suddenly felt superfluous. The noise from the TV had a threatening ring to it; a hostile world seemed to be calling to her with its urgent demand for involvement. A verse from a poem rose up in her mind:

  more than anyone else, you yearn for wings,

  the earth has burned your feet

  and it comforted her so she had the courage to leave the room and join the others, the way you enter a recurrent dream in which you know that everything is predetermined and nothing can be changed.

  The telephone rang as she walked past it out in the hallway. She picked up the receiver and said her phone number. ‘Excuse me for disturbing you,’ said a girl’s perky voice. ‘I’m calling from the newspaper Aktuelt. We’re doing a survey on the question: “Are mini-skirts destroying marriage?” The background for this is an article by…’

  The door to the dining room was partly open, and she saw Gert and Hanne sitting next to each other. Their backs expressed that intimacy between people that makes words super- fluous. She kicked the door shut with her foot.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I didn’t hear the last part.’

  ‘Yes, well, the question is whether young girls in mini-skirts are such a temptation to men that they’re endangering the institution of marriage. I’m talking especially about housewives 40 to 50 years old who stay home. We’ve asked a number of important women about this.’

  ‘Not if the marriage is a good one.’

  She heard an unnatural freshness in her voice and had a fleeting feeling that this conversation had taken place before, the way you recognize a landscape when you know you’ve never been there.

  ‘If men in that age group fall for young girls it’s because of an immaturity in themselves, it has nothing to do with fashion.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so either. Thank you and I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

  She went in and sat down next to Hanne as she considered whether they had heard the conversation. Hanne’s long, honey-colored hair hid her profile. In front of Gert there was a whiskey bottle, seltzer, and a glass, and he leaned forward politely to catch her eye.

  ‘How about a little drink?’ he asked. ‘You look like you could use one.’

  His eyes shone dully like raisins, and his ears, she noticed with relief, looked the same as they always did.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to bed soon.’

  She stared at the TV. The anchorman’s gaunt, bespectacled face grew suddenly distant, as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

  ‘There were violent disturbances in front of the American Embassy this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Police and demonstrators are still fighting…’

  He vanished and they saw demonstrators marching toward the embassy.

  ‘There’s Gitte,’ said Gert.

  ‘And Mogens.’

  Hanne leaned forward, and Gitte turned her head and seemed to look straight at them for a moment. Then she marched on triumphantly with the others.

  ‘You shouldn’t have let Mogens go,’ said Gert and took a big gulp from his glass. ‘He isn’t interested in politics. If his real father knew about this, he would be furious. But of course it’s none of my business.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t get mixed up in anything,’ said Hanne with her little twelve-year-old voice that hadn’t caught up with her real age. ‘Unless Gitte makes him.’

  ‘This is the first time since Gitte came here that she isn’t home,’ said Lise, ‘and then we see her on TV.’

  It was as if it couldn’t be a coincidence, as if it were part of what was approaching, part of the lurking evil that surrounded her.

  ‘The world has gone mad,’ said Gert gloomily, staring into his glass. ‘We can sense what Baudelaire calls “the terrible wings of time”.’

  She glanced quickly at him, through Hanne’s childishly fragrant hair. She remembered their Baudelaire period from the time when the children were small. They lived with quotes from him on their lips, and Gert had bought a rare edition of his works, but didn’t really know enough French to get anything out of them. What on earth had happened in the meantime? It was ages since he had been home in the evening. When her stepfather wasn’t home, Hanne usually kept to her room. Was he still thinking about his dead mistress? She didn’t think so because, all things considered, his strength lay in his lack of imagination. He couldn’t see with other people’s eyes and couldn’t feel with their nerves.

  The TV blared on with clips from the war in Vietnam. The picture grew blurry and she saw Gitte’s face again, staring at her. In her frugality, it was as if she had bought her face second-hand, intending for it to last a long time. That’s why the faces of poor people were often so incongruous; they bore traces of a childhood that was not their own, which always seemed to have been bitter and unhappy. She looked down at the table and took a deep breath – suddenly there wasn’t enough air in the room.