The Faces Read online

  ‘I think I’ll have a drink after all,’ she said and stood up.

  Gert turned toward her.

  ‘If you’re going out in the kitchen,’ he said, ‘would you mind looking in Gitte’s room to see if that English biography of Tolstoy is there? I lent it to her the other day, but I’m not through with it yet.’

  ‘OK,’ she said from the doorway, and it seemed to her that Gert and Hanne smiled faintly at each other, with relief, the way you do when a difficult math problem is finally solved. Out in the narrow hallway, which was so dark that they kept the light on all day long, she stood still for a moment, as though she had forgotten what she had come for. The noise in her ears had vanished and the silence filled her mind like a poem. Then she went on through the kitchen and into Gitte’s room. She closed the door behind her, but still had a distressing feeling of not being alone. On the table was Mogens’s tape recorder, whirring with one reel empty. He and Gitte recorded homemade radio plays on it. She shut it off and noticed the pills still on top of the dresser as they had been that morning. The image hadn’t been out of her mind for a moment. Frightened and fascinated, she stared at the brown medicine bottle as reality disappeared behind her like someone on a railway platform as the train pulls away. She heard indistinguishable voices from the basement apartment; Gitte knew so many awful things about the people who lived there. The book about Tolstoy lay next to the tape recorder, and there was a bookmark in it. She opened the book and read what Gitte, in her impersonal grade-school handwriting, had written on the bookmark. ‘Tolstoy never bathed,’ it said, ‘and his wife was frigid.’ All the pages of the book hadn’t been cut open. It was obvious what Gitte had gotten out of the book, as if she had forced from the author his most important secret. She read like a detective looking for clues in an apartment, without for a moment concerning herself with the whole picture. The voices from below grew louder, and as if driven by someone else’s will, Lise went over and knelt down, placing her ear against the base of the hot-water pipe near the floor.

  ‘She never shows herself outside the apartment. You don’t have to believe me, but they’re trying to drive her crazy. I’ve heard the husband and the girl talking about it.’

  It was a man’s voice, and terror shook her whole body like an attack of fever.

  ‘If I were her I’d go to the police. It’s criminal.’ Now it was a woman talking.

  ‘No, the methods are probably legal, all right. The husband is apparently an attorney.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  It was an old, squeaky voice, and Lise remembered that according to Gitte the mother was deaf, and that they always talked as if she weren’t there.

  ‘Shut up, old woman, it’s none of your business.’

  She stood up with difficulty and stared at the wall, which seemed stained with suffering and pain. Her heart was pounding in panic. She had to get away before the catastrophe struck her. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by a terrible weariness and she sat down on a chair. She longed for peace and tried to imagine what that word meant. She thought about those evenings during her childhood when her parents weren’t home. She would write verses in her poetry album that they weren’t supposed to see. She imagined how they were preoccupied with something other than her now. Peace meant not existing in other people’s consciousness. Now they were sitting in there waiting for her to take the pills. As a child she had always done what the grownups wanted her to do, but now her anger and rebelliousness awoke like a proud pillar of fire within her. She wasn’t ready to die. There was still something that she loved. She saw SØren’s lost face before her. He was growing up to a world of violence, and she was the only fragile bulwark against it. The weariness and despair left her. She would fool them. She would take the pills and then call Dr Jørgensen so he could make sure she was taken to the hospital. They wouldn’t be able to get her there. Friendly souls would surround her, and in the other beds would be women she could talk to about children and love, as she had done with Nadia when they lived together as young girls. In hospitals there was a white peace that smelled of ether – like the white peace after giving birth, when the pain had been endured. Gripped by a kind of gloomy agitation, she went over and picked up the bottle of pills. She had to move the telephone into her own room without their noticing. Her life depended on it. She tiptoed back down the hall and put the bottle on her nightstand. Then she went out in the kitchen again for a glass. She filled it with water at the sink in her room. Then she unplugged the phone in the hall, carried it over to the windowsill, and knelt down to plug it in under her bed. She turned on the overhead light and the sharp glare slipped in underneath her eyelids like a corrosive fluid. The door to the dining room opened and Gert called:

  ‘Where did you go? Wasn’t the book there?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll get it right away.’

  She ran back to Gitte’s room again, grabbed the book, and rushed in and placed it in front of him. They were still watching TV, and the whole thing had to be done before the program was over and before Gitte and Mogens came home.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed now,’ she said, ‘I feel so tired.’

  ‘You go ahead. Good night. Sleep well.’

  He gave her a look full of ironic sadness. That’s the way he would say goodbye to someone about to die, she thought. He had often said that there were enough people and books in the world. Any addition was merely a repetition. And love was a disease that you later looked back on with horror. Love for children was the only exception, because it was free of desire. But he also cultivated desire without love, which often led him to prefer prostitutes to mistresses. Her thoughts let go of him completely when she went into her own room after a fleeting glance at Hanne, who was sitting biting her thumbnail, intensely involved with a movie on TV.

  She looked up Dr Jørgensen’s number in the phone book. Hope moved like gentle, melodic sentences through her body where the terror had lain down to rest like a dog in its basket. She got undressed and put on her nightgown. She got into bed and poured the pills out in her hand. They were white and innocent and she didn’t count them. She swallowed them without thinking and washed them down with water. She didn’t know how fast they would work, but maybe there was no time to lose. She went over and lifted the receiver from the phone and asked for the doctor’s number. A woman’s voice answered.

  ‘Is Dr Jørgensen home?’ she asked politely. ‘This is Lise Mundus.’

  ‘Just a moment.’

  There was a humming on the line and the sound of laughter, as if there were a lot of people. Maybe he was having a party.

  ‘This is Dr Jørgensen.’ His voice was cheerful and self- confident.

  ‘This is Lise Mundus. I’ve taken a lot of sleeping pills and now I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said as if he had been expecting this for a long time. ‘I’ll send an ambulance right away.’

  He laughed, as if she had told the joke of the century, and she held the receiver away from her ear and stared at it. It sounded the way glass objects do when they’re smashed into a thousand pieces, and fear welled up in her again. She hung up the phone and Gert and Hanne’s laughter pierced through the noise of the TV. Hell enveloped her and she hid her face in her hands. Tears slid down her cheeks and it felt like her face was melting and running through her fingers.

  5

  The little ballerinas danced across the grass with a sweetness and innocence in their movements, as if there were still mother’s milk in all their limbs. They were dancing to music that only they could hear. Their radiant skirts were lifted by the wind and the delicate, completely identical faces wore enraptured, solemn expressions, which nothing from without seemed to disturb. The grass was greener than any other grass in the world, except for the grass on the lawns of Søndermarken during her childhood; on Sundays she would lie there on her stomach between her parents, whose youthful laughter filled the whole world. Suddenly a long shadow fell across the lawn, as if a storm cloud were passing in front of the bright sun. A gigantic policeman emerged from the trees in the background and approached the dancing children with steps as stiff as a wound-up robot. The children didn’t seem to notice him at all. He went over to one of them, just as her curry-colored skirt flew up and revealed her golden legs – her calves had the mature curves of a grown girl. Something flashed bright and clear through the air, and the girl fell to the ground like a doll. The knife was sticking out through her back, and the blood spread over the grass like a red, flaming flower. The policeman fumbled with his fly and threw himself on top of the mur- dered child, whose face turned slowly, like a sleeper whom no dream can disturb. She saw that it was Hanne’s face, and she wanted to scream but could only manage a faint whisper. The other children kept on dancing as if they hadn’t seen a thing. She wanted to stand up but something was holding her tight around the waist, and she heard a clear, authoritative voice very close by.

  ‘Are you awake?’ it said. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  Something blue and white fluttered past her, and she looked into a face as smooth and fresh as a newly laid egg.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and her vocal cords felt as dry as hay. The horrible sight had vanished, and she had probably just been dreaming. They always said that she had been dreaming whenever they didn’t want to have witnesses to something she had seen or heard.

  ‘Yes,’ she repeated with difficulty, holding her hand in front of her eyes to shut out the bright light, ‘but I don’t know where I am.’

  ‘You’re in the toxic trauma center. You’ve been unconscious for 48 hours.’

  Suddenly she remembered everything and smiled with relief. She had escaped them, she had fallen out of their memory like a fish through a gap in the net. She had never existed before for this girl with the egg-like face.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked gratefully and repeated the question a little louder when she saw that the young nurse had turned away from her and was now busy staring at a bubbling lavender liquid in a tall glass tube hanging attached to another bed. In the bed lay a naked woman whose skin was as dark and weatherbeaten as an old man from India. She was sleeping with her mouth open, and a whistling sound forced its way through her teeth, just like when the boys in her old neighborhood whistled by sticking their fingers in their mouths. A hypodermic needle was fastened to the back of her hand with adhesive tape, and connected by a rubber tube to an apparatus in which the liquid rose and fell with a rhythm that was demanding the full attention of the girl.

  ‘My name is Miss Jensen.’

  She wanted to roll over to face her but something hard and stiff cut into her waist, and she saw that she was tied to the bed with a wide leather belt covered with bolts and screws. They looked like all the merit badges on Mogens’s old boy scout sash.

  ‘Why am I tied down?’

  ‘So you won’t fall out of bed. People are always restless before they wake up completely. They want to get free right away.’

  You could hear that she had said these same sentences hundreds of times before, and Lise felt guilty because she wasn’t a real suicide. She had fooled the people here too and sneaked into the system like a grain of sand in a perfectly functioning clockwork. She looked at the unconscious woman and felt the shadow of a strange sorrow at the edge of her mind. At least they could have covered her breasts. They were limp and emptied, as if many children had nursed at them. Her body was covered with purple spots as if she had been beaten, and Lise suddenly noticed a terrible ache in her earlobes. She touched them, and they were so tender that she let go of them at once. At the same moment she saw Miss Jensen twist the woman’s earlobe between her fingers as she watched her face intently. She winced in pain, and the nurse looked satisfied.

  ‘Now she’ll wake up soon.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  They had taken her watch, and the gold chains around her neck and wrist were gone too.

  ‘Eleven in the morning. After the hospital rounds you’ll be moved to the state hospital. That’s what Dr Jørgensen has requested.’

  His name aroused all of her fear like a sharp needle against a newly healed wound. She remembered his hearty laughter on the phone, which had sounded as if she had just walked into a trap set long before.

  ‘I don’t want to go there,’ she said, afraid. ‘Why can’t I stay here?’

  ‘You’re one of his patients, and he’s the chief of staff at the state hospital.’

  She closed her eyes, and the ballerinas were there again, as if they were painted on the inside of her eyelids. They were dancing, absorbed in ethereal delight, and in a little while the terrible thing was going to happen. Quickly she opened her eyes. If this keeps up, she thought, I won’t be able to sleep at all. Now there was a rushing in her ears again. She discovered that the woman in the next bed had no chin. Her lower lip went right into her neck like on an animal. What a crime to bring such a deformed human being back to a life she wanted to leave.

  A doctor stepped in through the door and came over to her bed. His face looked as if he had just reached some major decision.

  ‘So you’re awake,’ he said and sat down on the chair next to her. ‘Is your mind perfectly clear?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Can you tell me why you did it?’

  She looked him straight in the eye – his pupils were totally surrounded by white, just like fried eggs.

  ‘I had such a terrible need to see some new faces,’ she said candidly.

  He jumped up as suddenly as though he had been stung by a bee.

  ‘This is no time for jokes,’ he said, ice-cold. ‘It costs the government 110 kroner a day to have you lying here.’

  He gave her a look that said she had just lost a friend for life, and went over to the unconscious woman and began slapping her cheeks as methodically and dispassionately as a piece of meat that needs to be tenderized. Then he left the room after exchanging a few words with Miss Jensen. She couldn’t catch what they said.

  ‘As a child,’ she said mournfully, ‘people always laughed at me whenever I was the most serious, and when I said something funny, they would get mad. But the doctor was mistaken, I didn’t mean to be funny.’

  ‘That’s what it sounded like,’ said Miss Jensen coolly. ‘But let’s not talk about that anymore; the ambulance will be here soon.’

  She was totally superfluous here, she had poisoned the atmosphere for them. At the state hospital she would have to be very careful with her words, the way you had to be with children who said what they thought, without inhibition. Something had forced its way in here too, the noise in her ears, the suspicious voices, and the images behind her eyelids. She longed for an untouched place, a virgin territory that her feet had not yet walked on, a path without memory where young lovers strolled, for whom she meant no more than the nail on their big toe.

  ‘I have to pee,’ she said, childishly. ‘Won’t you get me loose from this belt?’

  Miss Jensen went over to her and selected a key from a big key ring she wore on the belt of her apron.

  ‘Lean on me,’ she said. ‘You’re probably a little dizzy.’

  It was a long way to the floor, and her legs ached as they had when she was a child and they had been growing all night. Miss Jensen stood leaning against the open door of the toilet stall while she finished. An incredibly fat woman came into the white-tiled room. She wore a red-checked hospital dress, and Lise practically fell into her arms when she stood up and pulled down her short white gown.

  ‘Lise,’ exclaimed the woman, ‘don’t you recognize me? It’s Minna. We went to school together. And to think that you’re famous now. We all thought you were awfully stupid. Just shows how wrong you can be.’

  She looked surprised, as if her obesity had ambushed her overnight. Deep in her face Lise found the features of a little girl with pretty brown eyes and two dark, skinny braids.

  ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked, overcome with nicotine craving.

  The woman laughed so her double chin jiggled.

  ‘It’s not allowed here,’ she said. ‘No smoking. That’s one of the worst things. But it’s even worse to have no lipstick. I wasn’t a human being until I got one in here.’

  Lise felt her lips – they were dry and covered with little blisters that hurt.

  ‘Come on,’ said Miss Jensen impatiently. ‘You’re finished.’

  When she was lying in her bed again, her past rose up like a wall whose supporting building next door has been torn down. It stared at her with the vulnerability of her entire childhood. Moisture dripped down it like tears or rain. She suddenly longed to be somewhere else, away from her school classmate, away from the animal-like, unconscious woman, and away from the happy ballerinas beneath her eyelids.

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Jensen, ‘the ambulance is here now. Don’t worry, you’ll probably be in an open ward.’

  Two men in uniform came in and carried her down on a stretcher. With experienced hands they wrapped her in a red blanket and carefully carried the stretcher down the stairs. Inside the ambulance one of them sat and held her hand. His mouth was crooked, as if he had facial paralysis. It was as quiet as a cathedral. Hope burned gently in the young man’s eyes, which were clear and bright like Søren’s. He gave her hand a friendly squeeze, and she thought that she would soon be lying in a white bed, surrounded by gentle, kind women with whom she could talk quietly about men and love. In that new place the terrors would be gone. The man’s gaze seemed to caress her, and she closed her eyes without seeing the ballerinas anymore. Sleep cradled her in its arms like warm water, and she didn’t notice when the man let go of her hand.

  6

  The silence from the ambulance persisted, but she felt that there was only a fixed amount of it, and that she might use it up too quickly with any rash movement, the way men confined in a submerged submarine had to save on oxygen. She was lying in bed and staring out into the dimness, trying to orient herself. The room was large, with a high ceiling, and the beds resembled boats with white sails, rocking gently in a sea that was peaceful for the moment. The nurse had said that she should be quiet, because the patients were taking an afternoon nap. The room was divided by chin-high wooden panels into small, open compartments with four beds in each. In the middle there was a wide passageway where two nurses were sitting at a table across from each other, whispering. The headboard of her bed was up against one of the wooden panels. It was raining outside, and a poem fluttered through her mind on its gentle way through the world: