Excerpts from
The City and the World
By Peer Hultberg
No one could be in any doubt that Bjorn, the son of Holm-Jorgensen the
paint-shop assistant, was a bit out of the ordinary, strange, peculiar were
the kindest expressions the grown-ups used about him, although his
mother maintained that at first she had found nothing odd in his being
fond of wearing her shoes all the time, especially the high-heeled ones.
Even in the kindergarten he had problems with children of his own age,
and things went completely haywire when he started at school. Even on
the very first day, the eldest son of Bengaard the chartered accountant,
the other Bjorn as he called him, chose him as his victim, and as time
passed the taunts increased in viciousness, Bjorn was waylaid on his
way to and from school, his clothes were torn, his cap thrown away, his
schoolbag drenched in the gutters and puddles, and he himself
mercilessly beaten up. At first his teachers tried to protect him, and his
parents even considered complaining to Mr Bengaard personally, but
after a few months they grew tired and gave up, You have to make an
effort yourself, you know, they explained, and even his mother became
convinced that it was time for him to learn to stand up for himself.
Finally, the torments abated of their own accord, the other Bjorn could no
longer be bothered to persecute a victim who was so very passive and
the upshot of it all was that they merely kicked or pushed him over when
they found him a nuisance, so that he automatically learned to give way.
Bjorn was not particularly clever at school, nor was he particularly
hard-working, for this reason too he forfeited the attention of his
teachers, he left Fonssī Private School at the age of fifteen with
below-average results and without ever having had a single playmate let
alone friend. The only thing he loved was drawing, but the art teacher
was indolent as well as afraid of his pupils and tried to keep them quiet
by reading detective stories to them during class, allegedly to enable
them to concentrate on their work, so Bjorn didnīt get any support from
him either, on the contrary it seemed as though his teacher was even
more afraid of his gifted pupil who demanded to be taught than of his
indifferent and ill-behaved classmates. After leaving school Bjorn on his
own managed to get an apprenticeship in a firm of graphic designers.
The firm dealt with Froslevīs paint shop where his father was an
assistant, this was the reason why he discovered that there even existed
a possibility of such a training. It turned out that he had exceptional gifts
and at the end of his apprenticeship not even his boss was surprised that
he found Viborg too constricting, although it might perhaps be a little too
much for him to spend his meagre savings to go as far afield as Paris. For
some months he lived on chance jobs at the same time realising that he
had grown into a particularly handsome man of pure Nordic cut, le chap
du nord as he was called in the franglais jargon current in the circles
which he now frequented, and when early one Sunday morning he heard
the famous film star Albert Jean-Bartīs voice whisper in his ear Le dieu du
Nord he realised that his fortune was made. He became a stage designer,
very soon a very well-known stage designer, the Copenhagen morning
papers started to follow his career, and even the local Viborg newspapers
turned their attention to him so that when he had his great breakthrough
at the National Theatre with his magical, almost transcendental sets for A
Midsummer Nightīs Dream the headlines ran, Viborg Boy Takes London
By Storm, and if anyone was proud then it was his mother. She was living
as a widow in his childhood home, the ground-floor flat in one of the
small red brick buildings in Toldbodgade, and Bjorn visited her at least
for one long weekend every summer. In July of the same year as
Bayreuth had first approached him concerning next yearīs season, he was
taking his usual walk around the Norreso lake one Saturday morning. On
the pavement outside the house that once belonged to Emil P a stoutish
little man came towards him. He was dressed in a pair of baggy jeans and
a grubby white t-shirt with the printing You canīt be friends with
everybody, under which was the Danish flag, and below that the words
Out of the EC, and under that again his navel. He was sweating,
unshaven and it was written all over him that he was taking his holiday
and hadnīt washed that morning. Bjorn, he shouted, and Bjorn stopped
and recognised the other Bjorn. He couldnīt possibly refuse to pop up
the road, Amtmandshojen, to see what their house was like. It was a
long, low house of yellow bricks with dark-stained wood, huge
aquarium-like double-glazed windows and conifers in front, and Bjorn
followed the other Bjornīs proud gaze across to the carport where there
were no fewer than two cars, a greyish blue Audi 90 and as far as he
could see a red DAF. It was stuffy beneath the low ceilings even though
the double doors out to the garden were wide open, the rosewood
furniture was covered in material of a crude, non-fade artificial blue
colour, the dusty green plants in the wide south-facing window seemed
stunted and parched in their variously-fashioned ornamental flowerpots,
and the decorations consisted of numerous pieces of moulded Finnish
glass, a couple of plates by Wiinblad and four motherīs day plaques on
the end wall over the dining table. Did he fancy a beer, and Bjorn looked
in horror as the other Bjorn took a half-empty bottle of lager from behind
the potted plant on the coffee table and put it to his lips, he quickly saw a
way out and mumbled something about his liver. The other Bjorn
immediately curled his lips with the look of contempt and disdain which
Bjorn knew so well from his childhood, be became bolder and shrugged
his shoulders derisively, and when a dry-skinned, far-too-sunburned
woman, half a head taller than he, came in from the kitchen with a stained,
grossly over-washed jogging suit flopping about her and giving the
immediate impression of denoting the flabby skin on her body, there was
a directly insolent tone in his voice as he introduced, My wife, laboratory
technician in the Eastern Infirmary, and they seemed to engage in a
gloating conspiracy as they showed Bjorn the photographs of their two
sons and families, and they had done well for themselves, the elder was
already sales manager at Hedegård and Madsen, while the other within a
few years was expected to be head of the glass and china department at
Magasin du Nord in Århus, the other Bjorn nodded significantly in the
direction of the moulded Finnish glass. Years before, when Bjorn saw his
first performance of The Visit, the play made a profound impression on
him, again and again his thoughts returned to Viborg and his school
days and the other Bjorn and he imagined what form his own revenge
might take. As he handed the album of colour photos back to the other
Bjorn and his wife he realised that life in itself was sufficient revenge.
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