A good question.
I got into the chair and opened up the second notebook and found where we had left off the night before. “I told you I’m a burn diarist,” I said. “There’s nothing here for ten pages but quotations from the wise men.”
“Read them. Isn’t it important to know what you were thinking about?”
“Is it? It looks pretty gloomy from here.”
“Still.”
“All right. Here’s Thucydides: ‘Having done what men could, they suffered what men must.’ ”
She said doubtfully, “I guess I don’t ...”
“Having lived as long as they could, they died. Having fought as long as they could, they were killed. We should all have it engraved on our tombstones. Maybe you’ll like this one better. This is from Marcus Aurelius:
“And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.... And also what it is to die, and how if a man shall consider this by itself alone, to die, and separate from it in his mind all those things which with it usually represent themselves unto us, he can conceive it no otherwise, than as a work of nature, and he that fears any work of nature is a very child.... What art thou, that better and divine part excepted, but as Epictetus said well, a wretched soul, appointed to carry a carcass up and down?”
I flipped the page and glanced up. Ruth was staring at me, frowning. “Why would you write down something as morbid as that?”
“What’s morbid about it?” I said. “It isn’t very cheerful, maybe, but it’s wisdom. I suppose it struck me because I was a little tired of carrying the carcass up and down.”
She continued to stare at me for what seemed a long time—four or five heartbeats, I suppose. Then she folded back the covers and jumped out of bed and wrapped her arms around my head, hugging my face into her breasts.
“Why, Ruthie,” I said when she eased up and let me breathe.
“I didn’t know you were that ... I thought you were just tired out!”
“Well, I survived.” I pulled her down in my lap and we had a little cuddle. The cheek I kissed was wet. “Oh, now, come on,” I said.
“You ought to tell me more!”
“I wonder. Look what even a hint does to you.”
“But when I think of the difference it might have made!”
“Yes,” I said. “It might have made you so anxious about me you’d have driven me off the Knippelsbro. Now why don’t you hop back into bed before you get cold.” The fact was, I had pulled her down on me when I was kinked, and my knee was twisted and my hip ready to pop out of joint. If she had been sorry for me another minute she’d have broken me up like a Tinker Toy.
Ah, me, the complexity of being married to a woman you dearly love and automatically resist. I inevitably evade her management. I even evade her sympathy and affection, or meet them with my guard up. Martial is the anagram for marital. The grapple is everything, and I don’t mean the sex grapple that so obsesses the seventies. That is only the signature for something much more complicated.
“All right, that’s better,” I said when she was back under the covers. “Ready for more gloomy wisdom?”
“I guess.”
“Here’s something from Kazantzakis: ‘When a Greek travels through Greece, his journey becomes converted ... into a laborious search to find his duty.’ ”
“That’s you, for sure.”
“Duty? Me? I follow pleasures and grails and lines of least resistance.”
“Like fun. I never saw anybody so set on finding his duty as you. You’re like somebody hunting for the key to his house that he’s hidden somewhere, when he comes home at night and can’t get in.”
“All right, if you say so. I never deny what I wish was true. So here’s another one from Kazantzakis: ‘Never return to success; return to failure.’ And still another one: ‘Cursed be he whose thirst is quenched.’ ”
“I like those a lot better than Marcus Aurelius,” Ruth said. “They’re more like you, for one thing.”
“Never disparage Marcus Aurelius,” I said. “Did you know he was one of the earliest environmentalists? You could quote him to the Sierra Club. Here he says, ‘That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bee,’ and under that, in Allston’s crabbed hand, is written, ”The world suffers from an increment of excrement,’ which you might render into the vernacular as ’The world is full of shit.‘ “
That dried up any excess sympathy that might have been yearning toward the surface. “You know I don’t like that word,” she said. “Are there a lot more of these quotations?”
“Pages.”
“What were you doing, making notes on everything in Penguin Books?”
“Looking for the house key. Want to skip the rest?”
“All right. I get the idea.”
I flipped pages until I came to solid scribbling again. “So. There’s been a gap. It’s now May 13. The Allstons have just returned from a ten-day automobile trip to escape the Danish rain. They have driven (in the rain) through Hamburg and Hannover, with one splendid evening in a wine cellar in Celle. They have circumnavigated the East German border and traversed (in the rain) the Romantic Road through towns named Dinkelsbühl and Rothenburg, with mottoes and scriptures on their gables and Riemenschneider altarpieces in their churches. They have driven (in the rain) through a lot of blossoming apple trees to Innsbruck, where the Inn was full. Remember that green glass river, and the way the streets were full of lilacs and horse chestnuts blown off by a storm? Remember the Munich company that was singing Così Fan Tutte in the opera house? Then back (in the rain) through the Rhine-Mosel country, a fine experience because 1953 had been one of the best vintage years in history, and even the dollar-a-liter grocery store wine was marvelous. And so back to Copenhagen (in the rain) with the Rover’s boot full of smuggled wine to beat the Danish taxes, and the old lady quaking all the way for fear they’d be thrown in jail. We rejoin them in the apartment on Havnegade, in the company of their interesting but troubled friend the Countess Astrid Wredel-Krarup, abandoned wife of the celebrated quisling.”
“Idiot,” Ruth said. “Read.”
“Cursed be he whose thirst is quenched,” I said.
2
May 13, Havnegade 13:
Hugs and kisses for Ruth, none for me this time, when we get back. It is surprising how much it feels like coming home, and it gives me qualms that a pair of tourists should be as important in anyone’s life as we seem to be in the countess’. The poor damned woman has probably not talked to anybody but tradesmen and Mr. and Mrs. Behind since we left. And that’s the condition she’s been in for nearly nine years. Why doesn’t she emigrate?
One thing she’s done. She’s been in touch with her sister-in-law back at the old castle, and we’re invited down on May 20. Her wicked brother will not be at home—a shame, I’d like to see what real wickedness looks like. We will stay in the castle, which will give Ruthie a thrill. As for me, I will be able to take my mauve face into Bregninge village, if this turns out to be the right Bregninge (there’s one on Taasinge, too, and maybe others in other places), and see it reflected in the window of a thatched cottage. Maybe that will exorcise my yearning for visits to the ethnic and cultural source. Once that’s over, I can take Ruth down to Italy, where she’d like to be, where the food is good and the wine is cheap, and exchange my hair shirt for something more seasonable.
May 16:
Two mornings now we’ve got the countess to bring in her yoghurt and join us at breakfast. This morning, as we sat looking out at the harbor, it struck us all that the light was singularly bright, that there was not a cloud visible, and that the cheeks of bicyclists waiting for the Knippelsbro were pink with sun, not purple with rainy cold.
“We have to go somewhere!” Ruth said.
Denmark was all before us, where to choose. The countess said, hesitating, “Would you like to see my little Ellebacken cottage? We could carry
a picnic. If it is really warm we can swim—it is on the shore. And oh!” She is an atom under constant bombardment, no thought goes by without knocking off an oh. “Oh, you did want to meet Karen Blixen. Her house is by Rungstedlund, on the way. Shall I telephone?”
Ruth said automatically, “How does she feel ... I mean about your husband, and ...”
“We have that in common,” the countess said a little grimly. “In Africa, in the first war, her husband sympathized with the Germans.”
When she is excited she has an extraordinarily vivid face. She jumped up and went into her room, leaving the door open. After a couple of minutes, exclamations, questions, chirps began to blow through the open door like straw from in front of a fan. I understood two words of it: ja and farvel. Blazing with pleasure, she came back.
“Oh, it works so right! She asks us to take our picnic in her garden. She will give us the first strawberries out of her mistbaenk—how do you say? Hotbed? Do you not think she is a great writer? And she will like you because you are both so nice. Oh, I am so glad I can take you to her!” She stopped, looking at my face. “But is it too much? Are you well enough?”
I said I felt fine, which was only a medium-gray lie.
About ten, with the top down, we pulled out of the courtyard into a miraculously soft, warm, windless day. A few clouds as soft as cats had crept in to sit around the horizon, but they did not stir, just sat. The Østerbrogade was bumper to bumper with cars and bicycles. Weekday, workday, be damned. Father Rain had left town, and all of Copenhagen was headed for the beaches, shedding clothes as it went. The Irish priests who Christianized this country, and the Lutherans who undertook the maintenance contract, never had much effect. Danes on a sunny day are unreconstructed pagans headed for a festival—May Day, I suppose, delayed a couple of weeks by wet grounds.
Cars with Swedish plates, full of roaring young people, kept coming down the left side of the road, inviting me to play chicken. Cursing, I took to the ditches and woods and gave them the road. The sun always brought them, the countess said. Coming from prohibition country, they started getting drunk on the Hälsingborg-Helsingør ferry. By the time they, had been in Copenhagen an hour, they would be overturning launches on the havnefart, and the Danish women would have to carry clubs. Those Swedes, they are so rigtig, but when they have drunk some things they will follow you right up your own stairs.
The sun shone on us, the soft air flowed over us, the Øresund was very blue. I said, “A couple of days of this, and I might throw away my crutches and follow you myself.”
She is not prim. She gave me something like a leer. “Ah, it would not do if you were to get feeling too well!”
Impenetrable smile from Ruth.
“Oh, impenetrable!” Ruth said. “What is this ‘impenetrable’ business?”
“I read what it says in the book,” I said. “My glaciers began retreating and you were jealous, a little. Or so I evidently thought.”
“So you thought. All right, go on.”
We were out of the worst traffic. Suburbs, gardened houses, glimpses of sea: the Danish Riviera. The countess was telling about how they used to sail here, before the war. Then down the Øresund came a white ship, standing only a little way out from shore. “Isn’t that ...” Ruth said. “Yes, it is! It’s the Stockholm!”
We could see passengers crowding the rail in the sun, watching Denmark flow past. They had it so much better than we had had it, limping seasickly in through the rain two days late, that I gave them a certain Italian gesture. “Anathema,” I said. “The Yankee curse on all of you.”
The countess affected to be hurt that I did not like the ship that had brought us to Denmark.
“Anathema,” I said. “A bunch of damned Swedes.” We were all silly with sun.
Then we came to a stretch of beechwoods, and the light changed. Everything went palely green and gold. Between the smooth gray trunks the grass was starred with white anemones or hepaticas. The leaves passing over our heads were tiny, delicate, tender as pale green flowers, a tinted mist that in a couple of days would be a green roof. Fairies must have been invented in a spring beechwood. The ladies exclaimed and fell silent. At the far edge I made a quick U-turn and came back through. We rolled slowly with our heads tipped back, and at the edge turned again and came through a third time. Druidical magic.
Ruth, looking a little trembly, said, “I never knew you to do a thing like that before. That was lovely.”
The countess too. “Mr. Allston is not the way Americans are supposed to be,” she said. “Why is he not loud and insensitive? Why does he not think all things can be bought for money? Why does he respond to beautiful things? Why is he so nice?”
“Nice” is her nicest word. It is a fine thing to be admired by two attractive women on a spring day, with the top down. I felt like boxing my ankles. Shucks, girls, it was nothing. Velkommen, countess. Glad to do it.
A little farther on she directed me in a drive toward a house covered with ivy. “Karen said she would be in the garden,” she said, and led us around past a glassed-in porch with light sunny colors and wicker furniture. Outside, big overhanging trees, just leafing out. Tulip beds, about gone by. Lilacs darkly budded but not yet quite popped into flower. At the back of the garden a thatched cottage with a squat chimney, and on the chimney a stork’s nest.
A woman in a floppy hat stood up beside a raised, slanted hotbed. She had a trowel in one hand and a stone or clod in the other. She was small and thin. It was impossible to imagine this little creature leaving a dinner party to go out and shoot a couple of lions prowling the yard, or assisting at Kikuyu childbirths, or doctoring the great bloody wounds of Masai warriors, though I knew from Out of Africa that she had done those things and more. She was brown-faced and brown-handed, as if Kenya had permanently altered her Danish skin. Though she was smiling, no teeth showed in her smile: she merely bent her lips. Her eyes were dark, alive, and noticing. She stood very still. Witch, for sure. Shape-shifter. If you held a mirror behind her it would reflect not a little brown woman but a monkey, one of those ambiguous old-woman monkeys of her tales, or perhaps a still bird with a curved bill.
We were hardly introduced before, with the air of disclosing a delicious secret, she opened her hand and showed us what she had just dug up while planting a flower—a flattened cylinder of stone six inches long, marked with the crooked letters of a dead alphabet. Just as she showed it to us, the stork came back to its nest with a sun-darkening spread of wings. Karen Blixen glanced up. “Ah, old friend.”
They were two of a kind, as beady-eyed and as capable of stillness. Knew each other in Africa, no doubt, and in a lot of sabbatical doings. I looked for the broomstick, but the stork had hidden it among the nest twigs as she flew in.
Picnic on the grass. By witchcraft or otherwise, Karen Blixen produced the only salad we have had in Denmark that wasn’t composed of hothouse cucumbers. Also a very eucharist of strawberries out of her hotbed. Her talk was all of Africa. Listening to her bring it to life, monumentally primitive and powerful, I remembered the passage in Out of Africa in which a line of elephants emerges one by one out of the mist, as if being created before the eyes of the watcher.
“You loved Africa,” I said to her.
She gave me a dark, alert look. Her cheeks were wrinkled in fine parallel lines. She appeared to have no cheekbones at all, and her eyes looked too big for her face. A bird’s face, really. For the first time I became aware that she must be nearly seventy.
“It was life,” she said.
I made a motion that included the hedged, protected, breeze-less garden and the old chimneyed house in its overcoat of ivy: inherited country place, probably complete with all the lost loves, crimes, and whispers from the past that she has written into her stories. “And what’s this, then?” I asked.
“This? This is safety.”
I had the nerve to argue with her. “Is it bad to have a place to come back to?” I said. “An American, or at least one kind o
f American, would envy you. His parents or grandparents were immigrants, uprooted. He was born in transit, he has lived in fifty houses in fifteen places. When he moves, he doesn’t move back, he moves on. No accumulations. No traditions. A civilization without attics.”
“Or rubbish piles,” said Karen Blixen. “Or dungeons. Or ghosts.”
“Or rune stones.”
She continued to regard me with her dark eyes, interested. “You feel this.”
As if anxious to explain me, the countess said, “You know, Karen, Mr. Allston’s mother was Danish—from Bregninge, can you imagine? We go there next week, all three of us, to see if that is his safe place.”
She had taken off her scarf, and the sun was on her smooth hair. If Karen Blixen was a witch, the countess was a Lorelei, and not unclairvoyant herself. I had never said anything to her about why I had an impulse to see my mother’s village. My safe place?
Karen Blixen said, “Have you and Eigil decided to be friends, then?”
“He will not be there. It is a chance to see Crandmamá and Manon.”
“Eigil is his father’s son, isn’t that the trouble?”
I thought the countess flushed a little, but she looked back steadily into Karen Blixen’s look until the look was withdrawn. The old woman sat ruminating on the rune stone. It was remarkable how witchlike, how malicious and gleeful, her face could be. Click, went Ruth’s camera. I hope she caught that expression.
“I hope you’ll forgive me,” she said in confusion. “I couldn’t resist.”
“I don’t mind,” the old woman said. To me she said, “It’s too bad you don’t know Eigil Rødding. There is an accumulation, if you like accumulations. There is a house with an attic.”
Not sure whether she was baiting the countess or simply making conversation, I thought I might turn the subject aside. “If it weren’t for houses with attics, where would you have got your marvelous Gothic tales?”