Excerpts from
Copenhagen
By Katrine Marie Guldager
PANCAKES
On his way up with the lift in Tyin, Karl discovered that the tip of one of his skis had developed a crack. So when he jumped away from the lift, he pulled over to the side in order to examine the situation more closely. Birgitte and the children were at a practice slope not too far away. He fished up his foam-rubber mat from the backpack and sat down in the sun. The snow had not fallen for a few days now, so the snow had been tamped down hard. Karl took out an orange and a small knife. As he was peeling the orange, he happened to think about Heinz, his little brother, who lived right next to Café Intime in Frederiksberg. The juice from the orange was running down his hands.
When he got back to the cabin, he unclasped his skis and found the key in an urn sitting next to the doorsill. The doorsill was slippery and as he stood there balancing his weight in the slalom boots, he almost fell over. Then he put the key in the lock and heard a noise behind him. He turned around, but he couldn’t see anybody. It was Birgitte and the children, who were approaching from the other side of the house. The fact that they had already arrived annoyed him. He turned the key all the way around and pushed open the door. Being together with his family for 24 hours a day was tiring, even though Birgitte was clever enough to take the children with her over to the practice slope.
He had been cheating on his wife for so long that he considered it to be normal. He had lovers, and that was that. He removed his skiing gear and started to help the girls. The youngest one clung to him like an armored catfish. She wanted so much to learn how to lit the fire in the fireplace. Even though she was eight years old and actually too little to do so, he taught her, anyhow. She was allowed to crumple up the newspaper pages and strike the match. The flames created a reflection in her eyes and the scent of smoke spread itself around.
It started with his first secretary and it was she who had proposed that they would have an affair. It happened in his office, the first office he had as a real estate broker, she with her legs spread apart on the desk, he with his pants hanging down around his ankles. Just like that, suddenly. It was sheer luck that nobody came. The air had been full of flirting for a long while, but he had told himself that it was out of the question. He was ashamed of even wanting to do it.
On the way home from work, he was relieved, at first, but after some time, his conscience came forward. He stopped for a red light. The picture of his secretary sitting there with her legs spread out in front of him, the image of her open, twisted mouth was getting him aroused all over again. He could still feel the sensation of holding her around her hips.
He was going to tell Birgitte that evening, but this never came to pass. The infidelity became a bad habit. He and his secretary turned into addicts who were on the verge of going insane from running out of supply. They planned their encounters in different places inside the company office: in the closet, in the copy room, in the basement. At last, Karl couldn’t see any other way out than quitting his job and even though Birgitte wondered aloud about how he could resign from a good high-paying job, he didn’t have any problems with her.
Already at the next workplace, things went wrong again. This time, it wasn’t a secretary. It was a customer. He had just shown her an old master builder’s home in Köge when she suddenly asked him, right in the middle of the garden path, whether he was married. To which he answered yes. Yes, he was happily married.
When she phoned and asked to see the house one more time, they both knew what was going to happen. They arrived at the villa at exactly the same time. She parked her Alfa Romeo, and he met her almost at the center of the asphalt. Then, without saying as much as a word to each other, they walked together up the garden path. They walked through the whole house from the cellar to the attic and only grazed up against each other ever so slightly. She asked, curiously. He responded. They moved up the staircase, which creaked just a bit. They studied their surroundings very carefully and yet they knew that something else was going on, involving something entirely different than the surroundings. Finally, they reached the bedroom. The rolled down the Venetian blinds and switched on a single light bulb that hung down from the ceiling. She stood right beneath it while he undressed her, pulling the brassiere straps down over her shoulders. He kissed her cautiously on the neck and let his tongue glide its way into her ear. She put the brakes on him, and they stood there like that for awhile and felt each other’s breathing, a mixture of desire and pain.
Suddenly they had been standing like that for too long and they couldn’t stand it any longer. Her nipples brushed up against his chest. His penis brushed up against her pubic hair. The slow transformed in a flash into something fast and drastic. The bed was ready. But instead, Karl fucked her up against the wall.
Birgitte had known that Karl was cheating on her, the whole time. She knew it even before the thought had ever entered his mind. It didn’t bother her, though. Not anymore. She had learned to navigate her way through their marriage in a manner that was as unaffected as a marble. And she treated herself to expensive things. For instance, she had just bought a new car. And why not? She knew that this put a strain on their finances, but that wasn’t her problem. There was an unwritten agreement between them: she earned a bit of small change, but it was he who was responsible for the family’s economy.
Flying in over Copenhagen was a beautiful sight. It was fair weather and Karl and Brigitte each sat at their own windows. Karl enjoyed looking at Copenhagen, where he had been living for his entire lifetime. He pointed out Utterslev Marsh, the National Hospital and the city’s lakes to his daughter. He looked down over the city and felt a sense of happiness about recognizing different spots, but he also felt a certain sense of dejection: You could live your whole life in Copenhagen without discovering what was happening in the rest of the world. The stewardess asked him to straighten up the back of his chair to a vertical position. They landed at Kastrup Airport and found their car in the long-term parking lot. On the way home, they stopped to visit Heinz in Frederiksberg. Heinz could hear them crunching and rummaging about all the way down at the bottom of the staircase and he was about to call down to them that they should just leave their baggage in the staircase for the moment. But then he didn’t say anything, anyway, and they carried all their baggage up to his place, except for the skis, which were tightly fastened to the roof of the car.
After they had had some time, it was Heinz who drove them home. Through the rear-view mirror, he kept an eye on Birgitte, who sat in the back seat. The light was intense and was slightly shimmering. Heinz wasn’t really clear about why it was he who was driving, but he did it anyhow. Karl was sitting in the passenger’s seat.
Heinz parked in front of the town house in Maalöv and remained sitting for a moment while the others took their baggage out of the trunk. Then he let himself get talked into going inside. He had a fantasy that he was playing a role in keeping Karl’s family together. This was the reason he allowed himself to get persuaded to going inside and this was the reason that he settled down at the kitchen table and drank a beer. This was the reason that he sat there like a kind of center, while the children went to get their pets and the parents opened up their mail.
During his lunch hour, Karl sauntered down Istedgade with his hands in his pockets. He had been looking forward to getting back to work at the real estate agency. But on Monday morning, there had been one long and difficult conflict between him and his partner. They were not in disagreement about how the firm should be run, about what standard was to be upheld. What had become unbearable for Karl, was the familial tone. In the course of the last five years, his partner had come to employ not only his cousin and daughter-in-law but had now also given his own wife a job. Karl was sauntering down Istedgade, but after half an hour, he made up his mind to go back to the office. He had thought about paying a visit to a prostitute, but he had changed his mind.
Just a little bit past two, the youngest of his daughters called him to say that she was bored. She had been playing with her guinea pig, had given it a bath and put clothes on it. But now she was bored. She asked her father what she should do. Karl was friendly and accommodating:
– What do you want to do?
– Daddy, uttered his daughter, with a tone of desperation, as if the con-nection was about to be cut off.
– Daddy, are you there?
Karl pushed his chair backwards and felt like he was a stowaway on some ship whose destination he did not know.
– I’m right here, he said reassuringly. What do you feel like doing? Isn’t there anybody you want to play with?
– I don’t know, said the girl.
– You can make pancakes, said Karl. This usually calmed her down.
The girl did not answer. Instead she asked when he was coming home. Not only was Karl going to work overtime on his first day back after the va-cation. He was also going to visit a certain lady.
– Mommy will be home soon, he said.
The girl did not answer. Suddenly, she hung up. Karl was just about to call her again, but a minute later he had a customer on the line.
He was busy preparing a sales proposal when his computer broke down. The hard disc had started to make noise a month ago, but Karl had ignored it. He had thought, it will pass. It was like a large red warning lamp he hadn’t seen. He paced back and forth between the tables and fumed with rage. The others were looking sympathetically at him, at the computer, but Karl couldn’t feel any sympathy. He could only sense his own irritation. It occurred to him that the whole place smelled of lemons.
The breakdown of the computer was so extensive that he couldn’t solve it. He tried to deal with the situation step by step. Before he knew it, it was four o’clock and he could just as well take off.
Bach home, his daughter started making pancakes. She had a recipe that her father had drawn on a piece of paper. One cup of flour, one cup of milk, salt, sugar and one egg. Karl was walking up the stairway leading up to a penthouse apartment on Saxogade, his daughter was beating an egg on the edge of a bowl. Karl rang the bell and was let into the place. The woman who received him looked at him without any special interest. They had known each other for a few years by this time. The whole thing proceeded according to a fixed routine. He was already sitting on the plank bed, because they preferred the plank bed to the real bed. He undressed her, lifting the clothing up over her face and let the eyes glide down over her body. He laid down and stretched out. She said nothing, receiving him with as compliantly as a piece of paper.
Translated by Dan Marmorstein
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