Excerpts from
The Principal Sum
By Christina Hesselholdt
"How are the puppies?" asked my mother, "we´re fine," I answered and felt the lump slip under my fingers, and then another one. There were two rows of nipples on her breast, lightly ringed with dirt: black-edged mourning. The vet dropped the white lumps into the metal bowl, but first he held each of them firmly like fat white prawns between the prongs of his instrument. He put a white collar on her which she managed to push off so she could pull the stitches out: a long gaping mouth opened up in the shaved and no longer lumpy breast, and there was a sweetish smell of iodine, warmth, spit, flesh. "What would you rather have - a dog or a little brother or sister?" they asked me, and the following week we went to the run with the retrievers. I knelt down between two wriggling puppies, a third one jumped up on me from behind: I looked into a wildly excited face. "She´s called Minette´s Golden Alibi" said the kennel lady. "She can´t be," we said in the car, and my mother turned round from the front seat and stroked her golden-white side and gave her a name calling her after Isabella of Spain, who swore not to change her underwear before something happened that I didn´t hear. I buried my face in her coat and my mouth was filled with hair; showers of hair fell out everywhere, a coarser, shinier coat grew out, she became more Isabella-coloured. "Wouldn´t you rather have had a smaller one, one like the queen´s?" said my grandmother. "One that doesn´t shed its hair", and twisted an iced lolly round on her quick tongue, "so much". I tugged away at a good 42 stubborn kilos. "Good job it´s not winter," said my grandfather, pulling her on a sledge up to the end of the garden and sticking his spade into soil that was not hard there. She ran around the dinner table with her tail flowing like a banner and with me after her, the ball creaked in her mouth. She came on tiptoe with eyes staring, and found me behind a door. She held one end, and I pulled in the other, her paws slid across the polished floor, and from inside her came a deep singing sound. She gnawed her way through the rope and was tethered with a chain intended for a bull, which she pulled after her up in the zinc bath where, with a sigh, she settled down in the rain water. We went for a last walk down to the harbour, "it must be done now, you don´t want it to start hurting", and she went in from the ford and sank her lumpy breast in the water; sticklebacks lay drying in the nets, a blue wooden stick was washing to and fro, I pulled her, up the Ferry Hill, and every time she bent her head to sniff, I pulled at her. The vet lowered his hand, his white arm touched her ear, and she died on the carpet. I went into our apartment and expected her to come rushing at me.
Translated by W. Glyn Jones
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