‘Have you ever wanted to be called something else?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘What?’
‘Dana.’
‘Dana?’ she said, stretching out the vowels. ‘That’s a nice name. You can be Dana whenever you need to be, then. We women need to hang on to whatever we can.’
Anneli was mourning two lost loves – the good and proper Per, who had loved her too much, and the Italian for whom she had abandoned him. Emilio had sung to her and a throng of enraptured women on the deck in the Scandinavian twilight, and she married him on the same day the luckless Per stepped in front of a bullet in the Funen forest.
Now she sat in her high-ceilinged apartment at Sølvgade 6 discussing the logic of the heart with a snivelling little girl from the outer islands. ‘Never allow yourself to be ruled by the heart or the mind. Get the approval of both.’ That was a lesson that was worth more than thirteen years in a Danish school, and I would have done well to follow my Anneli’s little piece of advice. But needless to say, I forgot it as soon as I passed the door’s threshold and only remember it now, a whole lifetime and a hundred men later.
34
Sexual Science Class
1940
Maybe I was distracted by the fact that on the ground floor there was a dolled-up chick who sold herself to German soldiers? I sometimes encountered them on the stairs, excited on the way up, satiated, down. Anneli told me all about this nocturnal profession, which, being the child that I was, I couldn’t fully grasp but was nevertheless excited by.
And one day I saw her appear at her door, a buxom, broad-shouldered woman, who under other circumstances might have happily served in a bakery – your typical average Scandinavian blond – but now stood all dolled up at the crack of dawn in a salmon-pink negligee that struggled to conceal the tools of her trade, her bare toes protruding from open-toed high heels. She nimbly stepped back to make way for knee-high German leather boots, offering a discounted red smile. But even though she had the big, bulging eyes of an owl, her gaze was as dead as that of a whip-tamed circus animal.
One day my classmates spotted me on the pavement, and I dashed towards the red door of number 6 so fast that I rang the wrong bell. I ran up the dark stairs as soon as the hall door closed behind me and on the first landing was faced with an open door.
‘Oh, good morning, my little friend.’
It was a smoky voice, dark and slightly slurred. I see now, at the distance of a lifetime, that she must have been drunk.
‘I… I’m just going up.’
‘Oh? Do you live here?’
‘Yeah… well, no. I’m just…’
My brain had been completely overtaken by my eyes, which were so busy absorbing every single pleat of her glistening negligee and the rough skin of her throat that it could no longer hear or control my vocal cords. The woman wore a small gold chain around her thick ankle, and her toenails were varnished in gaudy red. Her hair was glaringly blond, a magnificent lion’s mane, a wig no doubt. Through her alcoholic haze she must have sensed how insecure I was, pale and breathless.
‘Do you know someone in this building?’
‘Er… no.’
The bell rang and downstairs the voices and shouts of children could be heard from the other side of the door.
‘Would you like to come in?’
‘Yes.’
It was dark inside the apartment; the long corridor was dimly lit by wall lamps giving off a faint yellow light that brought out the green of the dark wallpaper. Cautiously, I entered, passing the woman, as if I were scraping past the side of a mountain; the cliffs of her breasts loomed above and an odorous mist filled my senses with a mixture of exclusive German perfume, Danish sweat and soiled sheets, perhaps even the hint of aftershave. Her stomach protruded slightly and my eyes followed the belt of her gown like a sheep trail along these great slopes. Then she closed the door and walked ahead of me down the corridor to the sound of the floorboards. As mystical as an elf woman but heavy as a mare.
‘Can I get you something? Some cola?’
At the end of the corridor was a cubbyhole that had been converted into some kind of waiting room: two old, narrow, dark red rococo sofas, glowing lamps with tasselled shades and ashtrays on stands. Pictures that predated the invention of photography hung on the walls: Zeeland country vistas and Jutland cows, drawn with European meticulousness. I’d always been slightly fascinated by the realism of these etchings, boring as they are, because my country had never been honoured with images of this kind. Iceland had been a land totally devoid of pictures until our first photographers were born. No Icelandic Sagas or paintings had ever yielded us pictures of fjords or lava fields. But here on the mainland they had gone over every tree, every single leaf, with a pencil and etching tool with Rembrandt-like precision.
‘Can I get you something, dear? Cola?’ she repeated. I came to and took my eyes off the pastoral bliss on the walls, Danish cornfields and lakes annexed by German lightbulbs.
‘Yes, please.’
She disappeared behind a door she closed behind her, but soon reappeared with a small glass bottle of black liquid. I’d seen people drinking something similar in the Tivoli Gardens. She invited me to sit on one of the sofas – I straightened my school skirt, dark blue on dim red – while she sat on the other one, slipped a cigarette into the corner of her mouth, and struck a match.
‘Well then, dear. What have you got to say for yourself? Aren’t you at school?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have a disease.’
‘Oh dear. You look like a perfectly young, healthy girl to me. And what disease is it?’
‘I’m Icelandic.’
‘Icelandic? And is that really serious?’
‘Yeah. I can’t be in a Danish school. The kids might be infected.’
She broke into a cough that turned out to be the beginning of a laugh and she sipped at a crystal glass of brownish cough mixture. I sipped my cola, which was full of strange gaiety: the liquid danced on my tongue and tickled my palate. I’d never drunk soda before and reacted to it by sneezing; black drops spluttered out of me, sprinkling my coarse woollen skirt.
‘And what are the main symptoms of this disease?’
She grinned, and it was obvious from the way she spoke that she’d once walked down a university corridor, even sat in a lecture hall.
‘Symptoms of the disease?’
‘Yes, how does it manifest itself?’
‘Well, it makes you kind of… alone.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Is the Icelander always alone?’
‘Yeah, there are so few of us.’
‘Isn’t it better to be rare than common?’
‘No. Then everyone wants to own you.’
‘But isn’t it more fun to be gold than iron?’
‘Only boring people want to own gold. Gold isn’t even beautiful. It’s just what everyone thinks.’
‘Isn’t gold beautiful?’ she asked, surprised.
‘No. The most expensive things are always the ugliest. And free things are the most beautiful.’
‘Says who?’
‘Grandma.’
She was silent and stared at me for a while, then took a sip from her glass. I ventured to take another sip of the cola, which tasted delicious despite the strange fizz in my mouth.
‘But… aren’t you in the war?’
‘We’ve got some men in it.’
‘What men are they?’