The Human Principle

By Jens Smærup Sørensen

Excerpt from the short story "The Long Enchantment"

Normally, when at home, I did not allow my daily routine to get in the way. It was only allowed to exist from the moment I backed out of the garage in the morning until I came trundling back in again late in the afternoon. The drive there and back was long enough to afford me the time required for the process of readjustment. I always drove slowly up towards the pass, lingering as I rounded the last bend from which I could still just see my house. Then I drove at a fair speed as far as the motorway, and once there, put my foot down on the accelerator as hard as it would go. Not a day passed without the car very nearly getting out of control. Danger, however, became a habit. It wasn´t important. It was something different, an attempt to drive full blast into everyday life so as to arrive there, trying to exceed the speed of light and reach an entirely different dimension, thus breaking the ring of almost religious awareness with which I had encircled myself, just as in the afternoon I crashed my way out of that enchantment which to other people goes by the name of reality. And from the pass onwards I slowly began to find myself once more.

Work in the town meant money. And of course the prospect of a bit of sex life in the form of visits to the clinic during extended lunch breaks. But the important thing was to earn money. I worked in the export department of a largish firm. In spite of the influx of foreign visitors and countless telephone calls, I coped with it on the whole. In fact, I could spend all my time in the office and the only person who could normally intrude without previous warning was Greta, who was my secretary at the time. Absolutely no more than that. I never thought of her for a single moment as anything but a mere function. Altogether I tried to give as little thought to my work as was practically possible. My work, I knew it, was merely my way of propitiating the powers above. In return, I was vouchsafed the opportunity to lead a life of clearer dimensions during such time as was left over from it. I did not let my entire existence trickle away through my fingers as did other people. I had my own life in the mountains, where I was a part of their mighty rhythm.

I was standing there, stretching and yawning, when all of a sudden I found myself face to face with her once more. She had finished phoning and was about to say something. I interrupted at once. Forget it, I said. All I wanted to do now was to get to bed as quickly as possible. But obviously there was more to come, she didn´t budge. Have you got a torch I could borrow, she asked. After she had resumed her story I found the least I could do was to offer to accompany her down the road. I held the torch and as the full extent of the accident became evident from her words, the calm voice in which she spoke filled me with growing unease. Not that the voice, there in the dark, was lacking in gravity, but she made it sound as though what had happened was something that had taken place in a long-distant past. If, as was obvious, she had escaped miraculously without the slightest physical scratch, then, equally miraculously, there was, psychologically speaking, something positively fiendish about such invulnerability.

So her name was Ella. I had been unable to resist asking her directly albeit with appropriate casualness as I did up my shoelaces, and my bent head had served her as a pretext for ignoring my question. I looked up at her and she smiled - a long smile. So long that I had to stand there and wait to open the door until she had done smiling, for I could hardly just return the smile and quickly look away - that would look as if I were laughing, but also smack of familiarity; I´d have to find a way out and choose a reasonable reaction so as not to feel ridiculous. I thought I was just getting round to it and was about to smile back sympathetically when she cut our little game short.

As a connoisseur of all the unwritten laws of complicity, I had been going to say, smilingly, that of course she could disclose her name whenever she thought the time was ripe. Now, however, she suddenly inquired whether she hadn´t heard me ask her name. My name´s Ella, she said, making it sound like just another question. But my only concern was to shut the door properly behind us.


From: Translation - The Journal of Literary Translation. Volume IX
New York, Fall 1982

Translated by Nina Mary Sabra