Beloved Unknown

By Kirsten Thorup

The young man walked down the street towards the block where he lived. It was a quiet street in one of the wealthy quarters of the town. On both sides were trees and a wide aristocratic pavement. He was tall and loose limbed and walked with a long, steady stride. As regular as a machine. His long swinging arms made him look like a big black bird with lowered wings that at any moment might unfold and lift him up above the apartment blocks, up towards the starry sky and space. One of his ear lobes was missing, he had cut it off one day with a Japanese chopping knife to win a bet of 200 kroner. Not because he was a wild lad, but because he was high-spirited. His hair was cut close to his head and made a dark shadow round his skull, emphasising the unusually fine shape of his head. Like his hair, the black T-shirt and jeans fitted his body closely, as if they were painted on. His dark deep-set eyes had an otherworldly and self-sufficient expression that got one´s back up.

He preferred to take exercise by long nocturnal walks. He could think most clearly when his body was in movement. He had joined a fitness club for a short while, but he soon grew tired of struggling with the ridiculous exercise machines like comic strip instruments of torture. He had tramped around the quiet deserted provincial streets, accompanied only by the sound of his own steps. He had walked for hours until he had left the town behind and reached the cliffs that rose with a steep wall of moraine above the Belt, Storebælt. Over on the other side behind the invisible horizon lay Funen, a foreign land he never visited. It had become a recurrent ritual for him to go out and turn at the cliffs before returning home. He stood right out on the furthest point, known as the suicide´s last stop, and looked out over the water that became one with the sky. The light nights had just begun.

He had taken the woodlandpath back through the beeches in their new foliage. High above his head the crowns sang in the wind from the Belt. Walking through the forest he was in shelter, as if in a high-ceilinged dance hall, where dancers in the form of trees stood still in groups waiting for the music to start. He had an urge to embrace the silent trees, to feel the hard unyielding trunks against his body and melt together with them, become man-and-tree. But the trees seemed unapproachable, they rebuffed him and would not let him join their fellowship. He was seized with a dizzy feeling of alienation, of being a stranger on a strange planet. He hurried out of the forest as if in flight from a hostile army, camouflaged as trees.

"I am only travelling through. On my way to the future," he thought while he ran faster and faster. His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. He found himself in an exalted ecstasy produced by his body´s own chemistry. As soon as he reached the edge of the road and saw the first cars, he relaxed and went on at a normal pace. It was the small hours of the morning by the time he reached the edge of the town and the first street lights.

He grew more and more nervous as he drew near his home. It was a solid building from the 1880s erected by a shipowner who had made fortunes in South America. And in memory of the builder´s palmy days the property was called "Buenos Aires". He looked all around him, then sidled along the side of the house. He was afraid of the faces at the windows. Family men who were up changing nappies, and pensioners going out to walk the dog before the morning paper plopped through the letter box. He succeeded in slipping unseen into the stairway. He stood still for a moment breathing in safety away from the suspicious glances and disgusted comments of the dog owners. The residents hated him because he neglected his duties as caretaker; he let the weeds grow among the bushes in front of the stately patrician building and allowed the grass to grow wild in the small garden plot in the pleasant back yard.

Not only weeds and grass were the subjects of complaining letters to the caretaker´s office. Nameplates were left unchanged when someone moved. And the lock on the door to the yard had not been repaired, so anyone could go straight in off the street and get access to the back stairs and so into the apartments. The caretaker´s post and the basement flat that went with it hung by a thread. But he hoped that by making himself invisible to the other residents and living in obscurity he could delay the moment when he was thrown out.

A door slammed followed by shuffling steps and a vicious growl. He hurried down the steps and let himself into the basement, fumbling his way in the dark. The basement passage smelled of dust from the long disused solid fuel boiler and rusty heating pipes wrapped in coarse mouldy sacking. He held his breath until he was in the big low-ceilinged basement room where he hid himself like an animal in its den.

Translated by Kenneth Tindall