As the Swallow

By Anne Marie Ejrnæs

Gyllembourg emerged in front of the horse´s mimle a moment ahead of her. He didn´t look at her, yet reservedly snarled to her side.
    "I don´t feel like discussing your husband."
    Sine stared surprisingly at him. The pressure from the winter would have killed her had Gyllembourg not listened to her, but she had tried his patience, she saw that now. She lightly raised her dress with her hand, and she wanted to run up and grab him under his arm, say to him that she really understood, but he pulled himself away as if she were infectious. He stepped behind a nearly empty stall, standing beside a toothless woman who sucked in her thin lips in sheer expectation, and he hammered his fist down into the chicken blood and greasy feathers on the plank.
    "If you are only thinking of your husband, why aren´t you sitting at home with your father, crying over the loss of him?"
    People were beginning to flock together, and Sine gathered her coat at her throat before walking across the square with a bowed head and Gyllembourg at her heels. Vimmelskaftet closed tightly around them, and if he just whispered, he would have gotten through to her.
    "Tell me honestly, have you cried at all over your husband?"
    She peered down into the cellar of a grocer. His sacks of flour, his barrels of salted herring, and if she only had money, she would be able to buy cigars for her father.
    "No, I haven´t cried. But I have been sick ever since Heiberg left. For a long time I was certain that I would die."
    "Dear Mrs. Heiberg, you´re dying of your sufferings every other day, and I´ll tell you - it´s tiring."
    His voice was colder than the easterly wind, and Sine managed to gasp for breath before she drew her frostbitten tentacles far in under her skin. She didn´t understand it, but she had lost a friend, and she quickened her pace because there wasn´t anything left to say, even though he was pulling her by the sleeve of her coat.
    "Your colic, Thomasine Heiberg, your headache! Would you like me to tell you what those symptoms are covering up? Your emptiness! You don´t feel anything. You don´t possess a true feeling for anyone."
    Sine stood still on Amagertorv. The market was closed, and crooked poor people cleaned the square of leek greens and frost-curled cabbage leaves. She looked down at the ground, and her foot crushed a moldy potato so its white pus squirted out. When she lifted her head, her eyes were as cold as his.
    "You´re lying, Mr. Gyllembourg, and today you are mean. And I have felt much more for you than has been reasonable of me."
    "Reasonable! Reason is usually not an item you lack. The entire afternoon I have been like air for you out at Bakkehuset. And you have smiled and ingratiated yourself and wagged your tale for all the other idiots. Such an empty little goose!"
    He roared, and she was afraid that he would shake her up on the open street. His black hat had slid crookedly down over his left brow, and his rage had snapped the ribbon which had tied his tongue. Never had anyone offended her so cruelly, yet she felt a bubbling impulse to lift her arms and push his hat into place. She didn´t do it, but inside she was dancing as she walked down Østergade, although she kept her voice reasonable.

Translated by David Spencer Miller