The ice in front of us is silvery blue and I’m about to launch myself into a figure, drawing intricate patterns under the beams of the car headlights. That should give me some technical one-upmanship, although I feel him coming eerily close to my back, like a waxing moon over a frozen sea.
He is trying to sidle up to me; I can sense he is out of breath and feel him panting in the dark, but can’t really think of anything to say to him. I don’t know if I’ll go home with him or not yet, because I don’t know if I love my ex-husband, so I just try to keep a step ahead. If I had it all written down on a sheet of paper, my options I mean, in a manuscript, in front of me in black and white, I could simply cross out one of the possibilities.
When I glance over my shoulder, scanning over the white-streaked ice, I see that I’m drawing a pattern that looks like the intersection of the lifeline and fate line in the palm of my hand. I could probably carry on writing important messages with my skates, or even perform a pirouette and allow myself to glide towards him, etching the shape of a curved heart in the cold grey ice.
Instead I dash towards the hole in the ice, with headphones pressed to my ears and the volume pumped up high. The circle steadily grows bigger as I near its edge. He is trying to phone me now; I can feel my mobile vibrating in the lower side pocket of my trousers.
Personally, I can easily avoid that hole in the lake. The question is whether I might not be putting him in peril by coming so dangerously close, creating unnecessary suspense just to buy some time, simply because I don’t know what to say to him yet. Despite my mastery of many languages, I’ve never been particularly apt with words, at least not eye to eye, woman to man. Even though I know a regular sentence will require a subject, object and verb and, if it is to achieve any level of complexity, at least three prepositions, my power over words doesn’t stretch that far. I’m not particularly good at conjuring up words, the right words I mean, or saying them, what really counts. I can’t even spurt out the most important bits like “be warned” and “I love you”. In that order.
Now that there is nothing in front of us but the black hole and a decision urgently needs to be made, I can suddenly clearly see the difference between me and my ex-lover. I slow down and prepare to sway to the side, drawing a semicircle close to the edge, while he skids to a halt in a straight line, almost crashing into me, but I manage to swing away, taking a long curve that almost takes me to the bridge.
He catches up with me as I’m flexing my knees and about to shoot under the bridge, and envelops me in his turn-of-the-century scarf. I feel his hot breath on my eyelids. Everything is suffused in a reddish glow and I am, in spite of everything, a woman with a beating heart. I could just as well go home with him.
“Don’t you want to see me any more?” he gasps.
“No, I haven’t stopped wanting, but this is a difficult patch for me so I’m going away for a while, on a journey,” I say, because it is only at that precise moment that it dawns on me that I should perhaps take a trip somewhere.
He wants to know if he can come with me. I tell him that’s not possible.
“Can I visit you then?”
“It’s so far away, halfway across the planet,” I add, coming up with the kind of stratagem that always surprises me just as much as it does the men in my life. “I’ll be away for a long time,” I say to add further weight to my words and make sure there can be no turning back.
“But I’ll send you some postcards anyway,” I add.
He asks if he can make some Spaghetti carbonara for me.
“We could catch a movie afterwards.”
I tell him I feel it’s too soon to be going to the cinema with him.
“We could catch the ten o’clock screening instead.”
THIRTEEN
He is standing on the steps with a pile of cardboard boxes. I count ten, all the same size, and most of them carrying the logo of the company he works for, solid boxes with strong bottoms. This man never tackles any task unprepared, always so organized, precise. If it had been left to me, I would have turned up with three discarded boxes grabbed from the shop on the corner, smelling of bananas and cream biscuits, and totally unsuited to carrying books.
I help him pack, standing behind him, as he picks the books off the shelves and arranges them in the boxes.
Occasionally, we glance at the title page to see if a book is marked in either of our names; the ones we gave each other are mostly unread. I would have sworn that some of them were his, but I discover from inscriptions in his handwriting inside that they are mine, from him.
The travel books are on the lower shelf, an entire row. Childless couples are always travel agencies’ best clients. It is only now that I can discern some pattern in our purchases: Journeys to the Poles, The Arctic Trail, Adventures in Greenland, A Year in Siberia, Hidden Alaska—the entire northern hemisphere disappears into the boxes. I’ve got nothing against the purity of the white universe, but I prefer to be bare-footed in sandals and to travel as light as possible. Geographically speaking, he has always favoured the cold and I the heat.
As he examines a series of green icebergs, I skim through a book on the wildlife of a small island in the southern seas that he has left on the shelf. We’re the opposite in the bathroom: I like my showers lukewarm, he likes his steaming hot. That on its own could have explained the absence of children, if I had not systematically taken measures to prevent their conception. One of the best things about being a woman is you can at least have some control over the unforeseeable.
He occasionally browses through a book or opens one at random and silently reads, moving his lips.
I’ve never seen him do that before.
“Listen to this,” he says, reading some account of a struggle with a polar bear from some old memoir of an exploration to Greenland. This is something he has never done either, read out to me. He’s changing, is a changed man, he’s expecting a child.
I pretend not to see him when he packs away some books I received as prizes for being equally good at everything, for not being particularly good at anything more than anything else, for finding it difficult to prefer one thing more than another, for not knowing exactly what it was that I wanted at that point in my life. Which probably hasn’t changed much.
Mom and Dad chatted in Danish in the evenings, if there was something that wasn’t for me or my brother’s ears. They had met at a Danish Folk High School in Denmark. “Han må da være en god elsker, der er i hver fald noget hun ser ved ham,”* was the first sentence I remember learning in Danish. When I was five and a half I could wade my way through the Bo Bedre magazine.
* “He must be a good lover, she obviously sees something in him.”
When I was six years old, I mowed a lawn with an old manual lawnmower for a neighbour of ours who was a German teacher and sometimes gave private tuition in the summer to pupils who had failed their spring exams. Instead of being paid in money to buy candy at the shop, I would ask him for two German lessons instead because I had already mown both his front and back lawns. He then said he would offer me two extra classes, forty-five minutes each, at the end of the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when the other kids had gone home. The teaching took place at the kitchen table and, when I arrived for my first lesson, he had put on some potatoes to boil. He lived alone and knew he could expect to receive some fish balls through me from my mother.