On ‘&’ by Solvej Balle

Every time I read this story it reveals more of itself to me. We have five scenes. They relate to each other, but obliquely, like a string of planets in the same solar system. In the first, the narrator and her companion drink cocktails at a bar in the port of a vaguely mediterranean city. There is an amphitheatre, busy market stalls, cruise ships, a palm reader. In the second it is raining in the same or another city. There is a brown river, people walk along it carrying panes of glass. In the third we meet our title character, &. & walks with someone towards and through a city of squares and rivers. In the fourth the narrator meets someone. They walk through the streets home. They go to bed, they part. In the fifth there is a square where people are living in tents. Forces arrive in cars and storm them.

There is no dialogue in these scenes. Instead, the narrator probes them like a film camera might, a big roving eye. Each belongs to the same world. Is it our world? I go back and forth on this. It seems like ours to begin with. It has a harbour and ships and rivers and rain. But then the details take on a dreamlike, off-kilter quality. There is a bubbling violence that is revealed in the details of things. A body crawling with ants appears on some stairs. There is poisonous rain. Tent-dwellers are arrested. But doesn’t all this exist in our world as well? I am reminded of the way Tarkovsky presents the Zone in Stalker, how under his lingering lens perfectly ordinary elements like gushing water and the breeze rustling through tall grass become foreboding and otherworldly. A dystopian otherworld built from all the ordinary components of our own.

In ‘&’, objects and elements are personified, or they’re described in unusual ways. Water ripples ‘glance into each other’. Rain brings in the ‘newest languages and the latest models of liberation’ from under the door. &’s eyes are ‘like binoculars broken and wrongly assembled’. A battery, a hand, a horizon and a door all ‘crunch’ at various points. The translator in me is curious about the choice made by Mackintosh to use the word crunch here. Do hands and horizons normally crunch in Danish or is this word choice offbeat in its original language too? Is crunch a literal translation or is it an approximation for a term that sounds just as strange to the Danish ear? In any case, the use of crunch by Mackintosh here is ideal. Yes, hands crunch. It’s one of those sounds that you only hear when someone points it out to you, somewhere between doors creaking and knuckles cracking.

Like in Balle’s Calculation of Volume novels, ‘&’ is filled with revelations of minute details. It zeroes in on them. They are thrilling to me. Towards the end, she writes ‘In the streets people put up their umbrellas. The rain is heard softly against the fabric.’ That soft pat, of droplets repelled by nylon. I know this sound. I love this sound! Suddenly I’m aware of it for the first time.

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.