Excerpts from
Indian Summer
By Jens Christian Grøndahl
None of us cried when Gustav was buried. Perhaps it had taken him too long to die. The weeks when he lay in the room facing the forest or on the veranda in the sun wrapped up in blankets, had been like an unnatural pause in time, during which it just piled its dross up around us, with all that couldn´t be changed anyway. For Alma the tears were a task completed. She too was content to look on while the whiteness of the coffin lid was sprinkled with crumbling clods, as you supervise workmen when you are not quite sure of their thoroughness. She suddenly looked so old in her black dress, white and impenetrable. In contrast to Becky, who merely looked younger in black, even more lovely. Her dress was short, so you could enjoy the full benefit of her long legs in their thick black stockings. She leaned against me while the priest went about his work, and her eyes roved attentively. What did they see, I wondered? The little explosions of soil on the white paint of the coffin? The pleats in the priest´s ruff, standing out like a star of wrinkles around his turkey neck? The froth of foliage on the trees?
The very setting was an insult. Gustav, who had spat at all the gods he came across. An exquisite insult. But Alma had arranged everything as if in a trance, and I couldn´t decide whether the burial in consecrated ground was delayed revenge or just another example of how convention always takes hold of you at the cruellest moments, when the laboriously accumulated vocabulary of the personality runs out and you fumble for a foothold in the sudden dizzy muteness.
The photographers were waiting outside the church, not many, not nearly as many as when the media takes its farewell of a popular favourite, but enough to confirm that the contents of the coffin were not just any old remains of time´s blind cannibalism. Their flashlights clung to Alma´s furrowed cheeks and to Becky´s smooth face on which any irregularities had been puttied with make-up, and I looked up at the leaves of the trees turning their white sides to the wind, while I held open the car door for them. The next day there they sat behind the windows, beneath the headlines proclaiming the deep mourning of the daughter and the ex-wife. For some reason or other I myself appeared in the pictures as no more than a shadow on the front seat with its back turned, half hidden behind the reflection of the soughing trees. The old stories about Gustav appeared again, about the anarchist, the troublemaker, the libertine, the gilded genius who scorned his own success by constantly taking new paths in his painting. In the pictures he contemplates me through the photographer´s lens with his customary inquiring, sceptical glance, the same old doubt and contempt. He lived to be 57. I had known him since I was Becky´s age, long, all too long, before she was born. But I had seen nothing of him nor Alma for years and almost completely lost contact with him when he settled in Paris. Already then I missed him as you miss someone who is dead, when I asked myself I wonder what Gustav would say to that, or heard his disrespectful laughter. In my mind I met his gaze, his mischievous gaze and its way of opening an unsuspected room when I had once again let myself be cornered by the facts or my own respect of their inflexibility.
I hadn´t heard from him since I sent him my last novel shortly after he had left. He wrote back and explained to me, as he so often had done, why it was talented, and why my talent was my own worst enemy. As usual he was right, but I never replied. Nor did I write any more books. I was wearied right to the bone of chewing words and cementing them with my saliva. I had lost my innocence and could only shrug my shoulders at the image my surroundings had formed of the young sobersides burdened by modernism and melancholy. Later on, when I had grown skin over the scratches again, it was somehow too late. What was the use of all that manner? Every time I sat down at the typewriter I saw Gustav´s smile, and began to smile myself. I had married Harriet and started earning money, we could travel wherever we wanted, and during the years that followed life flowed on easily and without obstacles over the unanswered questions and prayers.
Only when I met Alma again did I realise how much time had gone by. Only when I saw what it had done to her face. The years had quietly devoured each other behind my back without my having quite relinquished the idea that the future contained more than my story, that it was more unfathomable and impenetrable even if the opposite had gradually become the case. Alma showed that to me with her weathered face. Beneath the crisscross lines on her skin I recognised the high cheekbones and the open forehead around those eyes which I once longed to be seen by, as if I could be born once again to I don´t know what new and entirely different life.
At that time she had been alarmingly beautiful. Her figure radiated a wilful and capricious arrogance, slender, tall and swaggering, her skin revealed it with a secret glowing light, even her cunt seem possessed of an unknown, unattainable nobility. Only time had been able to teach her body a touch of democracy, not by upholstering it and weighing it down to the ground, but by making it withdraw to the bones, wrapped in the mature woman´s subdued elegance. Her grey hair still enveloped her face in the same casual way, which had once been so exciting, kept in place with an ineffective little comb, but she was an empress in exile, Alma with the playful inquiring expression. She could no longer feel certain of the reply she sought in one´s eyes.
Once her smile and narrow grey glance had indicated an exclusive and secret intimacy, now the smiling eyes were strangely shy and short-sighted, as if she was not even sure I had recognised her when she separated herself from the crowd and deftly made her way past the arms bristling with wine glasses and cigarettes. As she came nearer I could see that I too was like a double exposure in her eyes, a faded negative she had forgotten to wind on in the camera, so that for a second the new picture superimposed itself on the old one in a distorted caricature. My own face too had slowly caved in, and I saw her remodelling it in her mind as she smilingly shook her head. Had it really been so long?
Translated by Anne Born
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