‘The English. They’re not like the Germans. They’ve got gin. Do they lie on you?’
‘Huh?’
‘The soldiers, do they lie on top of you?’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘Doesn’t it hurt? Don’t their guns press into you?’
‘No, no, they take them off first but… well, they’ve got other guns, actually,’ she said, pursing her lips to suppress the grin that was bound to follow.
‘Is that the weenie?’
She was speechless for two seconds and stared at me, fighting back the laughter and biting her lips. But cigarette smoke escaped through her nostrils, and the woman now looked like a polite dragon who doesn’t want to spoil a good party with her fire and smoke and retreats into a corner.
‘Yes… ha-ha. It’s… he-he… it’s the weenie. You’re funny.’
‘Is that like a gun?’ I asked sceptically.
‘Yes, don’t you think so?’ she answered, tightening her lips again to smother a smirk, as she pulled the cigarette out of the corner of her mouth and killed it in the ashtray on the high stand, which wobbled slightly from the strength of her stabs.
‘Our cook says a weenie is like an upside-down flower.’
Now she burst out laughing.
‘An upside-down flower?’
‘Yes, a tulip she says.’
She found this equally amusing and repeated the word ‘tulip,’ which made her laugh even more.
I rushed to the defence of Helle’s simile and added with a serious air, ‘But isn’t it difficult to get it inside…? I mean, it’s so narrow and… the tulip, I mean, is so flabby.’
‘Yes, of course, it’s a bit… a bit flabby.’ She had to make a brief pause in her speech to wipe the tears from the corner of her eyes. ‘But no, no…’ She could barely continue from the laughter, which had now become totally silent. ‘That’s why you have to start with some magic and transform the tulip into… into a cucumber.’
Now I’m baffled: ‘A cucumber? And how do you do that?’
This class was turning out to be even better than the education I was getting on the third floor. I had completed my elementary school in two months and was now attending the high school of life, where I was learning how to become both a lady and a whore.
‘That, shall we say… is something we do with our charm.’
‘Charm?’
‘Yes, when a man sees a beautiful woman he changes into… a vegetable, a vegetable!’ The burst of laughter that followed now was more like an epileptic fit. ‘They change into vegetables!’ That was the beer-swilling, smoky laugh that everyone has heard in a Danish pub.
I was embarrassed, like anyone in the presence of someone who has lost control of herself, and forced a smile. I felt the teacher had lost the thread of the subject, and I decided to steer her attention back to the topic that was most likely to come up in the exam.
‘But what is it that comes out of the weenie? Doesn’t something come out of it?’
The prostitute came gliding down from the heights of her laughter like a long-winged owl and perched on these words: ‘It’s called… sperm.’
She let out a hoot and bent over, covering her eyes, those big eyes.
‘And is there a lot of it?’
She looked up and stared at me in surprise.
‘It’s… it’s kind of like jam. As much jam as you’d put on a slice of toast.’
‘Have you tasted it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what does it taste like?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a bit like… have you ever tasted oysters?’
‘Yes.’ The previous summer I’d been on a trip to Flanders with Mum and Dad and had oysters in Ostend. They tasted like walrus snot, Mum said.
‘Is it like oyster jam, then?’
‘Yes,’ answered the blond with a light laugh.
‘Yuck,’ I said, pulling a face. ‘But you can still make babies with it?’
‘Yes,’ answered the big-eyed Dane, with an exclamation point stuck in her throat.
My God, what a weird system they had in this humongous project called life, and such strange rules, too. In order to create life, women had to paint their lips red and wear tight blouses so that the tulips would turn into cucumbers. Then they had to churn it until oyster jam came out of it and it was spread over the ‘eggs,’ where it had to wait a few days for a face to start forming out of all that mess.
‘And do you have many children?’ I continued to question the Danish prostitute, like a land-thirsty seal who had finally reached the shore.
She hesitated, and her voice had left the laughter far behind when she finally answered.
‘Yes. Two.’
‘Only two?’ I asked like an ass. ‘But Annel… but men come to you every day!’
‘Huh?’ she answered absentmindedly.
‘But men come to you every day. How come you have only two children?’
She stared at me with her saucer eyes and fell into a bewildering silence. She could have chosen a variety of answers but opted for the simplest.
‘No, I… I have just two. Just two children.’ And there was a touch of grief in her voice.
‘And are they at the Silver Street School?’ I continued like the most idiotic kid in the world.
‘No.’ She sniffed. Sometimes tears take the first exit they can find and slip down the nostrils. ‘They… they’re with their grandma.’
‘And is it good?’
‘Good? What?’
‘To do that thing with the weenie…’
‘Good?’ She pondered on this a moment, took a sip of her medicine, put the glass down, and then half opened her twisted mouth as her index finger stroked the lower rim of her left eye. Looking at me, cheeks quivering, she said, ‘No.’
Then she added on an in-breath: ‘No, it’s not good.’
To fend off the tears, she took another sip.
‘Why are you doing it, then?’ I asked mercilessly.
She didn’t answer, just sat there staring into empty space like a weary train driver who has been tracking across the globe all his life and is suddenly halted by God, who demands to hear the purpose of his life.
‘Is it for the money?’ I continued like the worst kind of Nazi.
‘No,’ she finally answered in a perfectly calm voice. ‘It’s not for the money, it’s for my husband.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and now she finally started to cry. ‘This is all… all for my husband. They were going to… send him away to Germany, to a prison… prison camp. But with this’ – her crying intensified as she spoke, releasing feelings that had been locked away in a cell for months – ‘he… he’ll get decent food.’
The tears trickled eye shadow down her cheeks, forming blue streaks, which, on meeting her face powder, developed white edges, and the horseshoe shape of her mouth gave her lipstick a tragic clownish appearance. All of a sudden her entire cosmetic edifice had crumbled; the beautiful woman was reduced to a heap of flesh and tangled hair.
‘All for my husband!’ I think she muttered through her wails.
This was therefore no ordinary flesh vendor, but a war victim. And maybe this was the real Resistance, a woman who fought the occupation the only way she could, by saving a man’s life with her charm.
She stopped crying just as abruptly as she had started and began to laugh. In a sudden temper she glared at me, told me to get going and not to utter a word of this to anyone, and asked me what I was loitering around her place for anyway. An Icelandic brat who should have been at school! It was no excuse that I was from a cold country and that there was a war going on, there was no war here, there were no battles being fought, practically no danger at all!
‘Is there no Icelandic school for you?! You must be able to go to some Icelandic school?’
‘No. I’m the only Icelandic kid that’s left in Europe.’