Excerpts from
The Pact. My Friendship with Isak Dinesen
By Thorkild Bjørnvig
The Parting
ON TWELFTH NIGHT, 1954, I dined again at Rungstedlund. As usual, I was the only guest, and Karen Blixen, derisive and gay, was not wearing the accustomed evening dress but rather a Pierrot costume. Since we were last together, she told me, she had been to Jutland and had visited my friend, who had recently returned to Denmark, but my friend had kept quiet about everything and had scarcely answered any question. Later she had refused to receive visitors and had written to the Baroness that she wanted to be left in peace. This evening began to resemble, more than anything, a bitter satirical play. Karen Blixen had again changed her attitude, and now poked fun at my friend, whom I still did not see, and at me because I did not do something about the relationship. But considering what we were like, that did not astonish her: "You with your foolish recalcitrance and cowardice, you, who dare not mingle your blood with another´s simply because you´re afraid of the sight of blood, and, as for her, don´t you see that her soul is no bigger than a pea?" I got quite worked up, but was so taken by surprise that I was totally paralyzed. And she went on with such monstrous jokes about us, about everything and everybody, that I, much against my will, had to laugh and let myself get carried along in a whirl of wild, hilarious, terrible irony; no one looked normal, and no one escaped. It was the perfect nihilism or black mass, and in one way or another it did liberate something suppressed in me, so that I ended up participating instead of protesting.
She suddenly became serious and said, "But I´m always the one who has gone about thinking of you and what I could do for you. Now cross your heart and answer: Have you thought of anything but your own misfortune? Have you ever really thought of me, how I was and what you could do for me?" At what answer could I give? It would have been ridiculous to have answered yes and enumerated how, and comical to have answered: No, come to think of it - I have not, or, frankly, I have forgotten. And there was something to her accusations: when one is unhappy one thinks mostly of oneself. So I said nothing, and no words were necessary either. She proceeded to go into detail with an intensity that had the character of a curse. And Karen Blixen truly possessed the ability to curse. What happens to the one subjected to such a curse? As far as I can see, what happens, psychologically at least, is this: the one who curses brings to light everything notoriously dubious in the one attacked, everything bad and inferior and pitiable, and turns it into the principal being, belittles and suppresses everything positive, an then insinuates that this agitated scum, this scarecrow, is plain and simple, the person cursed. This is exactly how Karen Blixen proceeded, after which she swept up what remained of me with an inexpressibly tender gesture, and put me to bed.
That was the last time I visited Karen Blixen at Rungstedlund. In the days that followed, I suffered a severe mental hangover, first and foremost because of the diabolically ironic and sardonically humoristic excesses, which I felt had had a debilitating effect, not the least when they, as in this case, joined with the curse´s total reduction of my person to form a strong chemical compound. For one horrible moment, I felt as if I really, without knowing it but by no means innocently, had accepted her invitation of long standing and had mounted her broomstick with her.
From Thorkild Bjornvig: The Pact. My Friendship with Isak Dinesen. Lousiana State University Press; Baton Rouge and London 1983
Translated by Ingvar Schousboe and William Jay Smith
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