Excerpts from
Copenhagen
By Katrine Marie Guldager
STENGADE
Anne had not been gone for more than twenty or twenty-five minutes before her husband Niklas started to feel a little sick. At first, it was only a slight headache. Then he also started to feel a certain soreness in his muscles. He felt an urge to lie down for awhile. When he woke up, he was sick. It was the same thing every time his wife went away. He got sick and he didn’t fell well again until she came home.
Outside, a heat wave was moving across Copenhagen. In the yard, a boy was playing soccer by himself. A few women were laying on the lawn and soaking up the sunshine. Niklas was dreaming that he was standing in a hot kitchen and cooking. His wife sat in the IC3-train and was just about to thread a needle. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have been sewing on the train. But this happened to be her favorite dress and it was missing a strap. The train was approaching Fredericia, and the needle had gotten stuck. She glanced at her fellow passenger, smiled apologetically, and had to exert force to push the needle through.
Niklas awoke.
He tugged at one of the shades and let it roll up. He looked out into the yard where the boy was busy kicking the ball up against the wall. From one of the apartments, the boy’s mother called down to him. It was time to eat. The women who had been laying in the yard and soaking up the sunshine carried their blankets over to their bicycles and started to wheel the bikes down toward Korsgade. Niklas went out in the kitchen and poured himself a big glass of milk. When he returned, he could hear that a wasp had found his way inside the room. He was so tired that he just let it be. He drank his milk in one gulp and gasped.
Anne stood in front of a shop window on the pedestrian street in Aarhus and caught sight of her reflection. She still had plenty of time to find her way to the hotel, take a shower, get dressed and spray herself with perfume. Anyhow, she couldn’t really relax. She thought about calling home, but didn’t feel she had anything to say. She found the hotel and was handed a key to the room. She took a shower and got dressed in half the time she had available and after she sprayed herself with perfume, she threw herself on the bed and lay there staring up at the ceiling.
The boy, who had gone upstairs to eat, came downstairs again. For an hour, he stood and kicked his ball in toward the wall. His mother started calling for him.
– I’m coming now, he called in response. But his mother couldn’t hear him. He booted the ball up into the sky and flung out all his limbs like a jumping jack. He simply did not want to go back upstairs.
As the evening wore on, it started to drizzle. Two weeks of heat wave were ending. Niklas watched the news, clad in only a pair of underpants that were too large for him. His mother phoned. His little brother was on his way home from a trip to Greece. In just a few minutes, he would be moving through the airport, together with the rest of the passengers.
In Aarhus, Anne made up her mind that it was time to get going. She took the elevator down to the reception. She was wearing her dress with the shoulder straps, but as she passed a large mirror near the exit, she saw that the strap she had sewn while sitting on the train was crooked. She stood in front of the mirror and felt annoyed at herself. Then she shook off the sense of annoyance and set out for the university, where was she immediately received by two of her colleagues whom she hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t until she was tasting the ice cream desert that she came to think about the strap again. Without really knowing why, she excused herself and walked on back to her hotel room.
When the telephone rang, she was staring up at the ceiling. Niklas sounded sleep-drugged and confused when he asked how she was doing. She didn’t quite know what to answer. But as she sat up and rested the receiver on her shoulder she managed to grab hold of a pair of scissors and cut off the crooked strap.
The next day, she was supposed to attend an important meeting, where she was supposed to present not only her own but also the entire department’s work to a company that might be interested in entering into a sponsorship. It was a meeting for which she had been preparing for months, and she had filled up the suitcase with large light-green display posters. Nonetheless, she suddenly felt that the meeting was pointless. She missed her husband and even though she had seen him that same morning, their separation felt wrong.
The boy who had been lying in his bed dreaming was relieved to wake up. He could hear sounds from the room next to his. He could hear that his mother had a visitor, but he didn’t know who it was. She thought he was sleeping and that he never heard anything, but he couldn’t help hearing. He was about to put on his clothes and sneak down to the yard so he could look up at the stars, but he was afraid of getting caught. Instead, he opened the window and looked out into the yard. On the other side of the yard there was man who was apparently enjoying the cool nocturnal breeze, but the boy didn’t know him and didn’t think any more about him. The man, on the other hand, was curious about the boy. He could recog-nize him from the yard and suddenly felt an odd sense of concern for him.
Anne placed a phone call to the train station in Aarhus in order to hear when the train was bound for Copenhagen. But before she got a connection, she changed her mind. Her colleagues would be disappointed if she dropped their affairs just like that. Instead, she switched on the television, found the needle and started sewing.
On the following afternoon, she got off the train at Nörreport and walked slowly up the concrete steps. No matter how short the time she had been away, she loved coming home to Copenhagen. She would never live any-place else. Halfway up the stone stairway, she noticed a boy who was sitting there. He looked really terrible. His eyes were shut. Anne wondered whether he was conscious or not and gently touched him on the shoulder. The boy slowly opened his eyes and one of his hands.
– I’ve found my tooth, he said, and showed Anne the filthy contents of his hand.
– Well, that’s fine, she said, reassuringly.
She stroked the greasy hair away from his forehead and moved on.
Translated by Dan Marmorstein
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