Since I put them on, the heavy weight has made me feel that all my country does is weigh down on me, that my people weigh down on me. I feel like taking a gulp from the man’s bottle. I want to live like them. To fall. To give up. To live without the weight of the world, just existing and being there. I want to seem as if I’m OK. I want to rely on people to take over. I want to be able to count on other people to deal with all of it. I am fascinated by the people who have given up, but continue to live. I could let myself fall down with them. Leave here with them, go drink with them, forget about the future and live by the bottle. Stop working, stop having an opinion about myself, stop paying the rent, stop having a place to live. I could just spend the nights wherever. I could just drink and be happy. How easy life would be: to be the living dead.
There isn’t a single man in a white anorak here. I get angry. Not one single man wearing an anorak! If just one man had an anorak on, I would feel better about the future. But now the men’s anoraks swill around instead inside of them, so they need to wear jackets that are far too big for them with inside pockets filled with more floating anoraks. They are no longer men; they are empty containers with floating insides.
It is one of those days again. I am a little girl, and I go to bed. My mother stays up. She sits alone in the kitchen and drinks. I can hear her getting ready to go out around eleven, as I expect her to, despite it being a weekday. I close my eyes and try to fall asleep, but I can’t because I keep listening to her, even though I don’t want to. I hear every single movement she makes. I can hear by her walk how drunk she is. How many bottles she has drunk. And I hear by the way she fumbles putting her glass down how hard she is trying to keep her head clear. I can hear by the way she talks to herself that she is in a good mood. I can even work out how the night will go. Many years, many nights of practising, have made me capable of predicting whether I will be able to sleep peacefully through the night or if I need to spend it constantly sleeping with one eye open. She needs to hurry now if she is going to make it to the bar, even if she does, perhaps, have a couple of bottles left still.
I hear them come in on Saturday night, and there are a lot of them. Sounds of laughter, of jokes and of people trying too hard to laugh at them, reach me through the wall. I feel calmer knowing they are happy, even though I won’t get any sleep as long as they are here. They move into the living room and start drinking, and I can hear that they have kept their shoes on. It will be me who will have to clean up after them in the morning. The music is turned on and turned up high, and they talk, and yell and laugh. I cover my ears with my pillow, but it doesn’t help. My mother is talking louder and louder as she gets more and more drunk. She gets this hoarse voice that doesn’t sound like her own. I hate that voice more than anything else in the world. It’s a voice that changes when it has taken a swig of what it likes. A voice that becomes friendly. A voice that sounds like the voice of fearlessness. A voice wearing a mask. Even her greeting has changed. Hi. I have listened to that voice all too often.
I start to nod off, because I am so sleepy, and when, a little while later, I wake up again, I can hear that there are fewer people in the living room, and that they are calmer now. I can’t hear my mother; perhaps she has passed out somewhere. I can hear two Danish men. One of them is about to leave, and the other one will follow. Once the first one has gone, the second man goes over to my mother and tries to wake her. He calls to her softly. I know very well what he wants. When he can’t wake her, he goes over to the door. I prick up my ears and listen to every step he takes. He continues moving towards the door, but just as I allow myself to relax, I hear him creeping even more quietly back towards the living room. I lie down in my bed and pretend to be sleeping heavily. I can hear him approaching my room. A thousand thoughts seem to whirl around me. I know very well what could happen. Somehow, I have to prevent it. He moves into my room, and I can hear him quietly placing his jacket and his large rubber boots on the floor so as not to wake me. But it is not until he walks slowly over to me and starts taking off his damn belt that it truly dawns on me what he wants. I open my eyes, lift up my head and stare directly into his eyes. “Shhh… calm down,” he says quietly, as he puts his hand out and moves closer. I sit halfway up and shake my head. I am angry, terrified. But I know it won’t help to act like that. It is not enough. It takes all my courage to say something: “I’ll scream.” He steps closer, and I repeat: “I’ll scream!”
When, many years later, I look back on that night—and so many others like it—I wonder over the scale of the courage and the strength of the will I possessed. Thin and fragile; an easy prey for the horny, drunken men in my mother’s life. But no. I could not accept a fate of being a rape victim. I knew that my womanhood, my life, my future would be ruined completely by such an act. I would not let that happen to me. If it happened, I would never be able to forgive myself. When I grew up, I would give up and become an alcoholic. My life would be over in a split second. I could scream, I could fight against it, I could bite, I could kick, and I would do anything to protect myself. No one was ever going to break me.
I can see that the Danish man understands what I mean, what I’m saying. I can see that he understands that I’m ready to do whatever it takes to fight back. He starts moving backwards as he repeats, “OK… OK…” He picks up his jacket and his rubber boots and walks out of my room. Shortly after, I hear him going out of the front door. As soon as he has gone, I hurry over to the front door to lock it, checking in all the rooms on my way back to see that there is no one in them. I want to know if I can sleep safe and sound for the rest of the night.
Sometimes, when my mother was drunk, she would call for me, so she could tell me things. She would cry, sometimes, while she was telling me them, and you could see in her eyes that she had slipped back into her memories. Her father had worshipped his four sons. They were destined to be fishermen like himself. His only daughter was a thorn in his side. She was good for nothing. He took to hunting her around the house with a knife, but fortunately many years of fishing had worn out his body and made him slow. He would yell at her. Tell her that she shouldn’t go to school, because it was her brothers that would earn the money, so she ought to be making food for them, washing their clothes and making sure they came home to a clean house. My mother stopped going to school.
Several times I have been woken in the middle of the night because I was being choked by smoke. The smoke would be large and greyish and would have gathered into a bank of fog that grew larger and heavier, until it sank from the ceiling to the floor. I would wake with a shock, without knowing what awaited me out there, how it would look, how much damage there would be, and the adrenalin would start pumping around my body. Luckily what had usually happened was that my mother had passed out cold while she was making food, and I would awake just before the food burned to a charred, black crisp.
One night I awake at dawn to the smell of fire. My throat stings. I get up and walk out of my room, but I can barely see anything for the smoke. When I come into the living room, I get a glimpse through the smoke of my mother’s legs on the floor. She has passed out again. I go directly into the kitchen, over to the oven. As I get closer, I can see that she has put some food in the oven and then fallen asleep, and that the legs of meat have burnt away to nothing. I go to set the oven door ajar and turn off the oven, when a thought hits me… I could leave the oven on. I could leave the oven on and walk away. But where would I go? I could go to my grandmother’s, but then she would ask why I was over there in the middle of the night. When she discovered that there had been a fire over at our house, wouldn’t she then ask me what had been going on when I left, and how would I answer?