Excerpts from
Mother
By Henrik Stangerup
Naturally my mother was the first person I fell in love with. For a long time I had a picture of her as a bride in white in the film The Three maybe Four hanging in my nursery, on the wall just above my bed so every night before the Lord´s Prayer and the light going off I saw her - and first thing in the morning when I opened my eyes. My Madonna, if I´d known what that word meant.
If my mother was religious, it was not as a Protestant, she only went into a Danish church for a christening, a wedding or a funeral, but she visited the Sacré-Coeur, the Madeleine and Nôtre Dame every time she was in France during the post-war years. She loved it when the French girls came out of church after their first communion in their white dresses carrying white gloves and in white button boots, and let her take their photograph. To her the little white brides of Christ were the soul and heart of France, "Oh, Henrik, you must go down there one day!" Home again she would suddenly take out her favourite novel to read from - Nevil Shute´s The Pied Piper, the story of a sixty-year old Englishman who saves a flock of children from German saturation bombing during the fall of France. Those desolate French highways, this noble and courageous Englishman who spoke so lovingly to the children from every country, and that frightful sound of the German bombers ... his success in getting the children safely to the Brittany coast was not least due to my mother. In my imagination she was with him throughout the long journey, she herself led a flock of children, taught them Danish tunes ... and I fell happily asleep.
"The Pied Piper ... can you remember?"
"Yes. What a lovely book that was."
My mother gazed out over the Mediterranean. After my father´s death in 1976 she sold the house in Sorgenfri and moved to Nice, to an apartment on the Promenade des Anglais. I myself had had a fiasco over my Brazilian Holberg film, had been divorced and in an attack of raving depression had written a memoir in the form of a novel that had been something of a succès de scandale. I lived in a little flat in the Rue de Bassano as foreign correspondent in Paris for the Berlingske Tidende and hoped to get going on novels about anything but myself.
"But you didn´t write about that, Henrik!" My mother looked at me.
"What?"
"My reading to you."
"Oh, well, I couldn´t get everything in, could I?"
"You went into great detail about your childhood otherwise. And you turned me into a witch when you were getting married. Admit that you´ve never been able to stand me."
"But Mother, I had to tell the story in my own way. And whatever you say, you and Father refused to come to my wedding."
"You´re making it up."
"Can you really maintain that you came?"
Translated by Anne Born
|
|
