In our final Translation Tuesday showcase for the year, a lugubrious husband finds himself disenchanted with his marriage as his wife relates the tale of her former carefree life to their friends. Sissel Bergfjord’s beautiful story reveals a psychological truth about what remains unspoken in a loveless marriage. In Adrienne Alair’s sensitive and musical translation, a night of drinking turns up more revelations about the protagonist’s interior conflict than he asked for.
He didn’t like her when she had been drinking. She wasn’t someone you could say those things about: My wife drinks, or, My wife drinks too much. Tove was above all healthy and sensible, not because she was uptight or tried to proselytize or anything. She was a woman who hardly ever drank, let alone too much. But when she drank, the few times she did, it quickly became too much for him. Like now, as she sat in the yellowish glow of the Poul Henningsen lamp (and how did it look, really, to have a Poul Henningsen lamp hanging in something that resembled a woodshed) at Karen and Bodil’s place, her cheeks flushed, almost glistening, after several glasses of red wine. And now port! Her eyes shone in a way he very rarely witnessed, and that should make him happy; he should have a couple more glasses himself and get in the mood, follow her to the place she was in. Maybe he could even get her so livened up that it could lead to something. He had to admit, though, that this energy, this revitalization and rarely-felt mood of excitement were contagious at first, but then he remembered that he had been disappointed so many times, that he had long since resigned himself to a life devoid of eroticism.
He could not remember when they had last either made love or talked about the fact that they hadn’t. He had previously tried different tactics to ignite the spark in her: a trip to the opera, a hotel stay with spa treatments and foot massages, a surprise now and then. He had bought thousands of kroner worth of flowers to absolutely no avail. He didn’t even know if she had liked them, the bouquets—carnations, roses, tulips, lilies—she thanked him, smiled, and put them in a vase on the dining table, but he had not had any luck with getting closer to her because of it, and in bed everything remained as it had been for many years. She read from some book before she said goodnight, closed the book and set it on the nightstand, put in her earplugs and turned off the light.
About a year ago, he had dared to grab her by the breasts while she was frying lamb chops. They were still nice, her breasts, even though they weren’t completely firm, but she had twisted free of his embrace with a violent jerk, made him feel as if he had done something wrong, like it was no longer possible to think they were nice. He did not understand why she was so hard to turn on. Either she lay there outstretched and completely limp under the covers, like the dead seal they had seen on the beach a couple of years ago on their vacation in Skagen (it was starting to rot, and its head had been bashed in, or had been eaten by some larger fish, and now it was the seagulls’ and worms’ turn to dig in and prod at it. But the fur was still shiny as silver, with the characteristic dark spots. Even the whiskers were intact) or else everything he did was too much for her. That’s too rough, she complained, I’m very sensitive, she apologized.
So how was it that now, as they sat satiated and full after dinner with Karen and Bodil, she became so lively? Now the port was served, and they started talking about the wine, about Porto, and out of the blue she started telling them about the fling she had had on vacation there when she was young. Something she had never told him about before. He calculated that this must have been the summer right before they met at university. She had indeed been very sunburnt when she started in first year, he had noticed her immediately: the smooth round forehead, her laughter, and when he got closer, the freckles across her nose like a sprinkling of cinnamon. Had he noticed her more because she was sunburnt and imbued with the air of vacation and a hot summer romance? Now all of her was shining, her cheeks, her eyes, her lips, while—over the dregs of yet another glass of port—she recounted in detail, as if it were yesterday, the evening she arrived in Porto. She unconsciously knocked her elbow into her plate, where the sauce had dried up along with half a potato. Karen and Bodil made no motion to clear the table. Bodil smiled so a piece of spinach was visible between her front teeth, and Karen listened intently with her head cocked. His own wife had taken a train, back when she was not yet his wife, from Lisbon to Porto.
“I arrived in the evening, and I hadn’t checked out hotels or anything, I just took off,” she giggled, as if she herself could not believe that she could have once been so carefree.
It hurt to hear her say this. He could sense what would come next, and he had never seen her like that. When they were going on a trip, she double-checked train tickets and departure times and booked hotels four months in advance. The anxiety would be painted on her face if a delay or irregularity threatened to overturn their thoroughly organized plan, yes, even when he reminded her that they were on vacation and that she should relax a little—after all, this wasn’t a prison break or some secret mission they were on. It didn’t help. She was constantly on high alert, agitated and tense, whether they were at the airport or a central train station somewhere in Europe.
But now! It was like she was in another world, instantly transported back to her youth. She looked at least fifteen years younger, he noticed, as Bodil poured her more port, and he put his hand over his own glass and listened as she continued her story.
It was already dark when she arrived at the station in Porto. She slung her bag over her shoulder and walked up through steep streets, and it didn’t matter, she needed to move her body after the many hours on the train. It was warm, she remembered. (He could vividly picture her bare legs in a thin, light purple number.) She got thirsty and walked into a random bar (where everyone’s eyes likely turned in her direction, and the conversation grew quiet, so the broadcast of that evening’s soccer game was the only sound in the place) and ordered an orange juice, mostly because that was one of the only things she could say in Portuguese.
“I can still say it,” she laughed, “suco de laranja.”
She paused briefly before continuing, as if her own emotionality made her breathless, or she was taking a running start. At the bar she got to talking with a young man, Luis. He had offered to pull her suitcase up the hilly streets and help her find a hostel. She was not the least bit afraid, she just followed him and let him drag her suitcase while she tried to understand his unhelpful English. Luis told her about the places they passed. He was also a history student and, like many southern Europeans, proud of his country and his city.
Here he could have piped up with a pointed comment regarding the lack of trust she showed their own daughter. Or the lack of trust she showed all young men out there in the nightlife. Because did she not try to prevent their daughter from doing just that, going off with strangers? Had she not told Simone that that was just asking to be raped?
Luis contentedly pulled her weekend bag up the sloping streets, and she felt a bit like a fairy, now that she had nothing to carry, she said. Bodil smiled at this comment. Bodil, who herself was not the least bit fairy-like. He observed the spiky hairs that grew out of her chin, which he could not help but notice; they glowed white in the light of the ceiling lamp like a stubby goatee.
It turned out (not surprisingly) that all the hotels and hostels they passed were fully booked. It was getting close to midnight—exactly, midnight like in fairytales, he thought, where the bell rings in the bell tower and resounds across the city’s rooftops. Now Tove stopped recounting with as much detail as before. She paused briefly, shrugged, blushed as if she had just remembered that he was sitting at the table, that it was not just Bodil and Karen she was talking to, and her next statements were an oddly evasive attempt to wrap up her story. He watched his wife sip from the glass, and although she was no longer looking directly at him, tonight or in general, he nevertheless sensed something bottomless in her gaze, a lustful pain in her watery eyes. She laughed a little sheepishly, said that Luis had offered to let her spend the night in the apartment where he lived with his elderly mother. His hard-of-hearing mother, I suppose, he thought laconically, and wondered why his wife always seemed to lose her inhibitions when they went over to Bodil and Karen’s. It wasn’t just the port. What was it that animated her or made it so that she found it more natural to talk with them than with others? And why, other than out of politeness, would Bodil and Karen be interested in Tove’s youthful escapades, if not to be allowed to take in the sight of Tove just as she came to life in this way that she did when she had been drinking, the way he could not bear to see her, drunk in a girlish, innocent way and yet so sensual and alluring that he could not take his eyes off her. And Bodil and Karen couldn’t take their eyes off her either. He had a sense of fierce irritation. He felt excluded from the conversation for the single reason that he was a man. It was as if that was the idea, almost planned: that he should both follow the conversation and feel excluded all at once. As if she had drawn a line in the sand, hammered a post into the ground and definitively cemented the fact that there was no longer anything for him to get from her, the ounce of lust and desire she had left could only be invoked in the company of a lesbian couple. Bodil finally stood and asked if anyone wanted coffee. She took a couple plates with her to the little kitchen. He could hear her rattle the cutlery in the sink, turn on the faucet, fill the electric kettle and turn it on. It whined at first, likely needed descaling.
He stood to go to the bathroom. Karen looked up at him and smiled warmly. She stood, too, and walked over to the record player to remove the record that had, for some time, been spinning around silently after they had listened to jazz during dinner, and as he squeezed through the narrow hall to the bathroom, he heard her small voice. She had some fado, wouldn’t that be apropos? Portuguese night, he thought bitterly and latched the hook on the door.
*
The voices dulled and faded, as if he were hearing them underwater. He was quite drunk himself, he noticed now, too drunk to drive in any case. He inhaled the mild air from the open window, he relaxed his stomach and muscles, unzipped his fly, and pulled out his penis, looked down at the little thing and suddenly felt that everything about him was so goddamn sad. Maybe he had made a big mistake by not getting divorced years ago, when Simone was little and for a brief period he had fallen in love with a coworker. Nothing had come of it but a little heavy petting in the car. She had placed a hand on his dick outside his pants, while he shifted from fourth to fifth gear on the highway, it was raining hard outside, he could suddenly feel the sensation again of her hand against his dick, soft and warmly enveloping it, and he regretted that he hadn’t at least managed to have sex with her. In contrast to his wife’s flirtation from the distant past, he could not remember the woman’s name anymore. Mette, or Lene, something like that.
He let his stream meet the white, shiny enamel of the toilet, wished he could stay like that and piss for a few hours, a long continuous stream, not because it was particularly pleasant—it was also slightly chilly in the little bathroom—but because he didn’t know what to do with himself. It was becoming more and more of a reality that he could not return to the living room. He could not listen to some weepy fado, he could not look his wife in the eye. His wife’s story was hardly over; she had reached a climax, her desire to keep telling it was hindered only by his presence. If he left, she could complete the circle, and he would be spared the details. It was not difficult for him to imagine how the story would turn out. Obviously, she was offered the young man’s bed, while he would sleep in the living room on the sofa (the elderly mother was of course already in bed, snoring in her room), and Tove lay down in Luis’ bed on a sheet that was thin and soft with wear, wrapped in the scent of his body. She couldn’t fall asleep. She waited and rolled over, and finally she tiptoed out in her transparent nightgown through the living room to go to the bathroom. From the still air in the room, it was clear that Luis also lay awake. When she came back from the bathroom, he was sitting on the sofa as the light from a streetlamp outside the window fell across his bare back. He was not dark, but pale and shining like a marble statue. He turned with a jerk, asked if she wanted a cup of tea, he could make her one, and he could open the French door out to the street?
They drank the tea from small ceramic cups on the sofa while they looked out over the little square, and it was her, not him, who leaned against his arm, laid her head on his shoulder, turned her face up to him and stretched her neck to meet him in a long kiss.
He shook his limp penis, stuffed it back in this underwear, zipped up his fly and flushed. He could hear Bodil’s laughter and his wife’s slurred voice, the fado, the record had started in the middle of a soulful phrase. He opened the door and maneuvered back into the hall, but instead of going into the living room and sitting down and waiting for a cup of steaming coffee, he took his jacket from the hook under Tove’s and silently opened the front door. He felt the car keys in his pocket, tossed them onto the floor of the foyer and closed the door behind him. A light fog lay over the gardens in the summer night, the moon shone as if through a piece of tissue paper. He opened the gate and walked out onto the path, he jogged across the gravel towards the parking lot, crossed the lot and ran in the direction of the large lawn in front of the meeting hall. He ran in the same way he would if he were trying to catch a train, along a hedge and out, out onto the road and over to the field, between rows of nodding sunflowers. He ran across the field with the uneven earth beneath his soles and his legs whipped by the tall weeds, mugwort and sorrel, and as he ran further across the next field, which lay fallow, over the course of a long, distorted minute, he came to the realization that it was not his wife who was a dead seal. It was him. A smooth, wet body in the moonlight, which, if you took a knife and cut a deep slice across, would reveal a substantial layer of hardened lard, bloodless and devoid of character, without a shred remaining of anything that could be called a beating heart. He tried to shake off the image, but it clung fast, even after he made it to the other side of the field and passed the country estate they had discussed in the car on the way here. Tove had said it was a shame to see homes so close to motorways and industry. He didn’t want to think about her, he wanted to forget Tove and continue running until he could no more, he wanted to fall over into a ditch and be found by a friendly person, maybe a woman out walking her dog.
He stopped to catch his breath, supported his hands on his knees. He could not remember the last time he had run like that, felt a rattle in his throat and lungs, noticed the heat of his cheeks, like when he was a boy and ran around the garden at dusk, until the darkness made everything flicker, and his mother called him inside. It was a liberation, he felt alive, felt his pulse pounding in his throat. An animal suddenly ran in front of him, brushed his leg and continued past him. He looked in the creature’s direction, a small, gray-white lump moving quickly and nimbly, not any animal he had seen before, not a fox or a badger, but more like something resembling a rabbit without the long ears. He looked over his shoulder for a moment. The gardens lay like a dark, heavy stripe bordered by tall, pruned trees. Then he started to run after the animal.
Translated from the Danish by Adrienne Alair
Sissel Bergfjord is a Danish author and visual artist born in 1972. She graduated from the Danish Academy of Creative Writing in 2005 and debuted the following year with her novel Min morfars stemme (My Grandfather’s Voice), published by Gyldendal. Her second novel, Sortedam (2012), a quiet story of a young woman growing up in a home afflicted with alcoholism, was awarded the Michael Strunge Prize.
Adrienne Alair is a literary translator working from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish into English. She studied Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and has lived in Sweden and Denmark. She is now based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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