Excerpts from
Itinerary for Otto
By Henrik Bjelke
When as a little boy Otto came to close the door of his bedroom one day, he saw
something he should never have seen. Edel had been changing her clothes. With
her back to the door, she had just pulled her petticoat up over her head, had
unhooked her brassiere and corset and bent down to pull off her knickers. Her
very large posterior was quite naked, and Otto’s age and physical stature had
the optical effect of placing him at eye-level with this enormous white blob,
which he should never have seen unclothed. It was a large, pale behind with a
skin that had small hollows all over it, and if buttocks were drawn together
then the crack was just about a crack, but more a quivering line that simply
marked a division. What Otto saw was more or less a very large ball that almost
filled the whole doorway, and the ball was held up by two solid socles of thigh
and calf, which were also pretty enormous. But if this sight made such a strong
impression on the boy, it was because the sound of Edel’s voice told him at
once how immensely angry she was. ‘Out!’, ‘What the devil…’, ‘Will you please…’,
‘What do you think you’re doing…’ This great, trembling, pale, soft flesh,
these hard, rejecting, condemning words. Otto would remember it for years. It
was not just that Edel’s posterior was large, but Edel had fought a vain
struggle with this fatness, in the form of inferiority complexes, and her anger
had increased with the years, and this part of her body, this terrain de
plaie, had at least been abandoned and shut up in corsets and girded round
by a solid, aggressive taboo.
Archery was a new form of sport which at that time had begun to be cultivated
by amateurs. And in addition to having come to play a leading role in the
Fredrikshavn boys and men’s gymnastic association, Arnold had become primus
motor in an archery club, where women and children were also encouraged to
take part. Otto acquired a small bow and a quiver and stood in line with the
grown-ups and aimed at a large round straw target on a tripod that stood a long
way off. And in order to hit the mark he learned how to aim a little higher
than the centre in order to compensate for the arrow’s downwards fall. But Otto
did not care much for this sport.
Translated by David McDuff
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