‘Where were you?’
‘I…’
That was as far as I could get. It was the first time I’d been unfaithful. And with a whore, what’s more. A drunken whore. ‘You can’t stay long today. I’m so tired.’ ‘Yeah, no, no. I’ll just go. It’s late.’ ‘Will you remember one thing for me, Dana?’ ‘Yeah, what?’
‘Always remember, for the rest of your life, not… not to let them get you.’
‘Right… Get me?’
‘Yes. They will try to.’
‘The Germans?’
She gave a faint smile.
‘Men.’
‘Men?’
‘Yes. Beware of them.’ She shut her eyes ever so slowly, her eyelashes fluttering like butterfly wings. ‘All men? Not just Germans?’ ‘All men are Germans.’
She seemed to be aware of the ambiguity of her words, because I felt I could discern a smirk in her eyes. But still, I was only eleven years old.
‘Not Dad, he’s Icelandic. And your husband! Isn’t he Italian?’
‘Dana, and also promise me…’
‘What?’
‘Don’t become a woman.’ I was totally lost now. ‘Don’t be a woman?’
‘Yes. Women have such a rough time. Just be a person. Not a woman.’ ‘Huh?’
‘Yes. Promise me. Not a woman.’
She repeated this almost inaudibly, like an exhausted runner who’d finally crossed the finish line and was gasping an important message to someone who still had the whole course of her life to run. And she closed her eyes after every sentence she uttered. But how beautiful she was on that pillow. I almost felt like kissing her, those red lips, strange as it may seem. I longed to give her a big, juicy kiss, to rub her thick lips against mine, lick her tongue. How come? ‘Don’t become a woman.’ Had I become a man? With these words, the heartbroken Anneli had probably transformed me from a girl into a man, igniting some hitherto unknown fire in me. All of a sudden I stood there like a wet-dreaming dwarf in front of his Snow White, frozen with her coal-black hair, snow-white skin and blood-red lips.
‘Look at me. I’m just lying here because… to be a woman is like being… it’s just a disease.’
‘Huh? What?’
I’d grown deaf with desire. She seemed to sense it, because she now appeared to be addressing her delirium more than me.
‘To be a woman is a disease. A deadly disease. The only cure is to become a man but… because they call us the weaker sex and for the whole of our lives plot to get us… into bed, to have us lying in bed…’ She cast a fleeting glance at the glistening white bedside table. On it was what looked like a letter over an open envelope. It had been folded and one third of it stood up so that the light from the bedside lamp illuminated the paper from the other side. Through it I could see clumsy handwriting in blue ink. Then she looked at me again and said, ‘All men are Germans. Remember that, Dana. And promise me you’ll never wear a yellow star.’
She uttered those words with a calm that belied the suffering that lay beneath them. She half-closed her eyes for a brief moment again, then looked at me and repeated, ‘Never wear a yellow star.’
I hadn’t realised that this woman, who looked like the model for a wine and rose commercial, had the blood of a fighter. I thought that love was her only god. That she was a woman first, then a person. But this lesson etched itself in my memory much more than her classes on the organs of love, perhaps precisely because I didn’t quite understand her warnings about yellow stars and men being Germans. We sometimes remember better the things we don’t understand. But I took in the lesson and decided never to love to the point of ending up in bed for love (unless for my own pleasure) or for the simple sake of being a woman. I never managed to live up to the latter part but succeeded at the former. I never loved anyone 100 per cent. Because that wouldn’t have been sensible. No one should cook their heart in a single piece. You’re better off slicing it in four, frying one or two pieces in the pan, and storing the rest in the freezer.
Anneli was worn out at the end of her lecture and now spoke with closed eyes. I stood up. Raising her eyelids with great effort, she took my hand with her soft, pale hands (it’s only now that I realise that the woman’s cheeks and hands were, of course, swollen from the drugs and heartbreak). I bent over her, kissed her on the cheek, and felt its autumnal freshness on my springtime lips. A kiss without a single trace of lust. I had locked all my sexual desires inside me before kissing her. And this brought a definitive end to my innocence. My first adult repression had begun.
Inside my soul the stem of a flower had sprouted a minuscule bud, black and hairy: a passionflower had taken root, an eleven-year-old exhibiting the first signs of womanhood. And I had immediately entered into denial. But wasn’t that precisely what Anneli had told me to do? I was totally befuddled by all the signals I’d received on that big day.
She smiled at me and then, with her eyes, indicated a small ornate box that stood on a chair by the open door. It was the size of Grandad’s cigar box, square and varnished in black, adorned with black pearls and a small mirror on the lid; I could see my greed reflected in it. It was a jewellery box. I loosened its tiny latch and lifted the lid. The box was empty, but at home I had various small artefacts that she had given me in the previous weeks that I could put into it. The inside was padded in a rosy velvet that gave off a scent that beckoned me, luring me down into the box’s inner pinkness. I inhaled the pungent fragrance; it felt like a blend of different perfumes that had been sprayed on tantalising flesh in moments of pleasure and fused with the products of the body, neck sweat and armpit dew.
And I felt those feminine flavours drawing me in. Come here, come here, little girl. You, too, shall be a woman, woman. Don’t think you can slip, slip away. Come here with your puerile organs and dimpled smile and let me fill them with doubts and dilemmas. You, too, will have to struggle under the weight of breasts through life, plaster yourself with creams and scents and colours, grapple with fat and endure bleeding and difficult births, and then lose your value as you’re exiled to the land of wrinkles and thrown into the dustbin of life. Woman! Woman! Blissful pain awaits you behind the blood-red curtain. You thought you were a child who would turn into a person, and now realise you’ll only ever be a woman.
38
Young Witch
1940
At the end of a long day in the School of Life at 6 Silver Street, Copenhagen, I stepped out into the November afternoon with the precious box. The shadow of the opposite row of six-storey buildings reached the fifth floor on my side, and further down the street the yellow leaves of the Rosenborg Gardens shone in horizontal rays. Copenhagen was as beautiful as before. The occupying forces had not yet conquered the trees and the light. The air was saturated with a pleasant coolness, which in my infantile mind I attributed to those thick stone walls of the city containing a frozen core (the Danish tundra), where winter was kept and sweated in isolation in the summer but exhaled cold air as soon as the sun stopped shining on them.
I waited awhile on the steps and cautiously glanced around the pavement. There were no schoolmates in sight, so I ran to the corner in a single sprint, then slowed down and strolled towards town, on the side of the park to catch the sun, with my schoolbag slung over my shoulder and the box in my hand.
There were few people about, and I allowed myself to walk in the new stride that the day demanded; I had acquired a feminine electricity in my gait; I walked straight and skillfully, thought I was a little bit more Dana. I felt the coarse wool school skirt flirting with my chilled legs, which were bare down to my high white socks and black lace-up shoes. They had been flat earlier that day but now felt like high heels, I thought. The black, hairy bud grew with every step. Yes, I had definitely turned into a woman, which was precisely what Anneli had told me not to do. This confident, graceful stride was accompanied by a sense of guilt, and what could be more adult than feeling guilty about having become sexy? Irresistibly, tongue-foamingly sexy.