Ten Stories from The Principal

Translated from the Danish by W. Glyn Jones

The Blinds

With the drawing of the blinds, a lid was being put on the box which the sitting room already was.

My grandfather said, ‘I suppose we’d better not be on show to all and sundry,’ and rose heavily to his feet.

There were four windows in the sitting room. Like someone putting a metal snuffer over the living face of the flame and suffocating it, he pulled down one wax-coloured blind after the other over the world outside. The window ledges were full of flowers, and he knocked against them.

‘Be careful, Christian!’ shouted my grandmother.

The last dark strip disappeared with a sound like a smack, and then there was nothing but us in the illuminated box. He lay down and talked about ships, the routes he described at such length got on her nerves: ‘My head just can’t stand all that talk.’

She only really talked to me. Then, to make up for everything, she set about peeling an apple in a single strip that grew and dangled in great twists from her rotating hand. But the sitting room threatened on all sides. The only thing I could hope for was thunder, for then the blinds would be rolled up each with a smart snap so that we could see the flashes of lightning properly and count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder clap. We would wake up in the loft, heavy and confused after only a short sleep, by his opening the door in to us, or else the rumbles would already have woken us up, and she would say, ‘Now he’s coming to fetch us,’ as the steps leading up to the loft creaked.

‘Yes, yes, we’re awake,’ she said when he came in, fully dressed and with his overcoat on, as though it were daytime and he was just coming in from outside.

‘Why on earth do we keep that thatched roof?’

The lightning could strike the roof, and then we’d be burned alive up in the loft. And so now, one by one, we went down the creaking stairs with me in the middle so they could take care of me. To walk into the sitting room in the middle of the night was like meeting someone dressed in unaccustomed clothes – dark but very much alive; the furniture seemed to be distorted, not quite right. Then he let the blinds up; there was no world to be seen, but it was there all right, rumbling away. The apple skin was in the ashtray, and so were her earrings, marguerites edged with gold, things that wouldn’t have been left there if it had been morning. I sat in an easy chair with the duvet around me; only if it were really bad would she pass my clothes to me, and I would dress with my back to them. We sat in the dark, it was dangerous to switch on the light, the electricity in the house would tempt the electricity from outside to come in, and we watched the lightning, liquid metal dripping down in zigzags across the sky and hurling scary flashes of light into the sitting room, and lightning that drew red lights across the sky as though it had
got the better of God, and now God was on fire. Each time a thunderclap came rolling from far away and exploded inside the house, we looked at each other. He closed his eyes and began to count the seconds from the time the lightning flash came until the crash followed.

‘Is it all that bad, Chris?’ she asked.

‘Sshhh,’ he replied, and a crash followed that devastated everything.

She unwrapped herself from her blanket and stood up in the middle of the floor with her back to him and drew her nightdress over her head; it was made of some artificial material that made her hair crackle and stand on end. Then her knickers appeared with legs that were rather too wide, and then her chemise, thin white material with a pattern of thousands of holes not much bigger than pin pricks; she pulled that down over her breasts, which she pressed, touched and pushed about several times with her plump upper arms as she hooked her bra in front, over her stomach, turned half way and pulled it into place; then she put her arms through the straps of the chemise. When he had said a number, I repeated it after him. She sat down on a chair and pulled on her stockings, which were more flesh-coloured than her legs – bending down made her breathe heavily; at last there was the dress.

‘It’s right overhead,’ he said.

‘Are you going to fetch them, Chris?’

He nodded and disappeared from the sitting room. She handed me my clothes and fetched our coats from the hall. We heard him rummaging about in the bedroom, and I knew he was standing on a chair searching in the top of the cupboard. He came back with the deed boxes and gave her one. We all three sat around the table with our overcoats on, and on their laps they were holding the small wooden boxes fitted with locks, with the keys sitting in the locks. They contained documents, the deeds of the house, birth certificates, marriage certificate, insurance policies and money.

‘One, two, three, four,’ we counted, and soon only ‘One, two, three.’

Then there was a damp booming noise high above us, the rain – no, it was hail, I was already by the window, ‘Not too close,’ and a moment later the window pane fell on to the window ledge in great resounding fragments, and a plant pot fell to the floor; the house and the lawn were being bombarded with white bullets, small eggs were drumming on the window panes. The lashing of the hail and the thunder claps had come one on top of the other like layers of clothing, the hail at the bottom and the crashes on top. The thunderclaps sounded like clothing being ripped up. We moved back into the room, away from the windows, with the deed boxes.

Madame Rochas

We sat in the dark car and waited, quietly; she was a statue out there in the front seat beneath her scarf; my father had stopped the car a moment before and left it without a word, disappearing across the market square. Then the door opened, and as he got back into his seat in front of the steering wheel, he dropped something on to mother’s lap and quickly placed his brown gloved hands on the steering wheel. I leant forward between the two front seats.

It was a present.

He didn’t look at her.

‘Is that for me, oh, thank you very much,’ she said in surprise, keeping her distance warmly. She was holding a box of her Madame Rochas perfume in the air.

‘Can I open it?’

It was handed back to me, and as we drove on I pulled the plastic film off the box with its bronze and yellow flowers and came upon the heavy bottle that was covered with the same pattern; gold, a host of tiny flowers and bronze all woven together, and the stopper was of gold.

Nothing could be more splendid. They were silent in the front, the present was in the back with me.

The Horse People

The trough was a long groove running through the stable at stomach level. Petersen pushed his shovel into the mountains on the fodder truck and made torrents of grey oats and brown molasses run down into the trough. The heads grabbed at it. The horses stuck their heads in the food, pulled them out again and nipped the one beside them when it started eating too close. Bobbing profiles, I stood watching them from the stable door. Was there someone up there in the hay loft holding strings attached to all these heads and pulling them up and down? There were some ropes tied round the enormous bales of shining straw, the ropes cut into the straw – and into my fingers when I carried a bale. The hay fell from the bale in flakes like boiled cod from its bones, if you merely lifted it; there was no rope round that bale. The horses knocked their knees against the wall and nipped at the heads, they were beside themselves at the sight of the fodder truck which had still not reached their part of the groove, not yet, not yet. A powdery muzzle gave up the trough and plunged into the water bowl that was fixed there and pushed the button so the water came. A long tongue glided over a piece of saltstone. Behind the horses the women mucking out the stable pushed their forks into heavy wet straw and shovelled it up into wheelbarrows; a fork caught a fresh horse apple, the whole bunch rested on the fork for a moment and then its own weight tore it apart, the bunch split up and the apples rolled out between the fork’s prongs and splattered down on the stable floor and into the wheelbarrow; a mucker-out came to the layer of dry, motionless shitty straw, the carpet for the hind legs, and she shoved the fork into it until the stone floor could be seen; a mucker-out pushed a broom across a urine-wet floor, the bristles turned brown and wet and circled and hesitated in front of a horse apple; it was a whole mountain they had to push along. Sparrows and dogs ate horse droppings out on the road if they could manage it – a big dog sticking its snout up under a horse’s raised tail and catching the apple before it hits the ground. There were holes in the roof and through them there were swallows coming in all the time, diving in a grey flash and sweeping in and out of the stable; tails were raised, pink anuses pushed out all their folded mucous membranes, and the brownish green droppings were pressed out through the sticky rose-petal circle and fell and struck the ground with a smack, and then there was a slurp, a sucking noise, as all the pink withdrew to form a discreet button, and the mucker-out came with her brush; Pluto the albino’s anus was the pinkest, and when it opened out you could see freckles; I went in to the albino and put my arms round his neck, he was eating, he was amazingly white, whiter than white, white, white, white, pink muzzle, freckled eyelids and lips, I put my arms over his back and hopped up and down, and he turned his head and put his teeth into my back.

The Moonbeam Sofa

When he told me, a wall arose in my breast.

‘Do you like her better than us?’ I asked.

‘I like her in a different way.’

‘Which way?’

The January light couldn’t make headway in our lifeless, worn-out post-Christmas living room; or perhaps our curtains hadn’t been drawn back although it was very late morning, just in the same way as I still had my nightdress on; we hadn’t taken the day, perhaps the dog had not even been let out. My mother had disappeared the previous day: before that, she had come home from town with two well-filled shopping bags, her shoulders skewed; a couple of cucumbers were sticking out of one bag, the bags were leaning up against the dining table, and I was just trying to pull something up from the bottom of one of them and was being scolded for my pains when someone rang the door bell and a couple of visitors came in and sat down on the sofa. There was talk of being terribly tired, and all the time the shopping bags were leaning against the table, with their contents pouring out, big broken eggs which I wished someone would kneel down to and spread their arms and hair over. They talked about being tired, and shortly afterwards she disappeared with the visitors who virtually glided out of the door.

My dog lay still, the dog lay still that particular morning. It wasn’t wandering about restlessly. It had been taken for a walk. It lay on the floor in its pile of fur and smelled warm, its feet were jerking, it was dreaming that it was running, and so it ran, one corner of its mouth moved up and down, smile and end of smile in one trembling sequence. The fabric on the sofa was called ‘Moonbeam’, it was turquoise with narrow darker turquoise stripes of silk thread. If the cushions were not arranged as they should be, the stripes on the cushions were staggered when they met the back of the sofa. I sat on the sofa and turned my head and looked out at the Christmas tree on the verandah, standing there on a bed of its own needles; by Easter, a brown skeleton would be knocking on the glass door. I had a turquoise bath robe over my nightdress.

‘So I want to live with her.’

‘You mustn’t leave us.’

‘But that’s how it’s going to be.’

‘No, no, no,’ I shouted and saw that my father was already sitting on the edge of his chair, and I gathered the sofa cushions over me.

Minette’s Golden Alibi

‘How are the puppies?’ asked my mother, ‘we’re fine,’ I answered and felt the lump slip under my fingers, and then another one. There were two rows of nipples on her breast, lightly ringed with dirt: mourning, black-edged. The vet dropped the white lumps into the metal bowl, but first he held each of them firmly like fat white prawns between the prongs of his instrument. He put a white collar on her which she managed to push off so she could pull the stitches out: a long gaping mouth opened up in the shaved and no longer lumpy breast, and there was a sweetish smell of iodine, warmth, spit, flesh. ‘What would you rather have – a dog or a little brother or sister?’ they asked me, and the following week we went to a place which sold retrievers. I knelt down between two wriggling puppies, a third one jumped up on me from behind: I looked into a wildly excited face. ‘She’s called Minette’s Golden Alibi,’ said the kennel lady. ‘She can’t be,’ we said in the car, and my mother turned round from the front seat and stroked her golden-white side and gave her a name, calling her after Isabella of Spain, who swore not to change her underwear before something happened that I didn’t hear. I buried my face in her coat and my mouth was filled with hair; showers of hair fell out everywhere, a coarser, shinier coat grew out, she became more Isabella-coloured. ‘Wouldn’t you rather have had a smaller one, one like the Queen’s?’ said my grandmother. ‘One that doesn’t shed its hair,’ and twisted an iced lolly round on her quick tongue, ‘so much.’ I tugged away at a good forty two stubborn kilos. ‘Good job it’s not winter,’ said my grandfather, pulling her on a sledge up to the end of the garden and sticking his spade into soil that was not hard there. She ran around the dinner table with her tail flowing like a banner and with me after her, the ball creaking in her mouth. She came on tiptoe with eyes staring, and found me behind a door. She held one end, and I pulled the other, her paws slid across the polished floor, and from inside her came a deep singing sound. She gnawed her way through the rope and was tethered with a chain intended for a bull, which she pulled after her up in to the zinc bath where, with a sigh, she settled down in the rain water. We went for a last walk down to the harbour, ‘it must be done now, you don’t want it to start hurting,’ and she went in from the ford and sank her lumpy breast in the water; sticklebacks lay drying in the nets, a blue wooden stick was washing to and fro, I pulled her, up the Ferry Hill, and every time she bent her head to sniff, I pulled at her. The vet lowered his hand, his white arm touched her ear, and she died on the carpet. I went into our apartment and expected her to come rushing at me.

Shake

We weren’t allowed to have a knife, and so Anette used her nails to scrape up the black chewing gum from the asphalt where it lay looking like piles of melted tyres and formed soft imperceptible mounds. She was the one to do the scraping because she was the best at it, and meanwhile I leant over her, ‘Move away, you’re in my light,’ or I threw myself down on the warm asphalt beside her and kept a look-out for cars so we couldn’t be run over and flattened and need someone to come and scrape us up. The white stuff was no use, it turned grey from use, and the pink was no good either, because it lost its colour and looked all chewed up, but the black, Shake, kept its colour, and perhaps it even became a more intense black from use. She loosened the lump all the way round the edges, and perhaps it would come up from the asphalt straight away, or perhaps she would have to dig and pull long strands free. Where the threads let go of the lump it turned white in protest, and she put each lump down in my hand as she pulled it free. And she held my wrist tight so as better to be able to guide my hand. Then she cleaned her nails which were black from soil or dried snot beforehand, and shook the bits down on to the pile; I gingerly transferred the pile from my hand to hers, and she started pushing and kneading it. At last she was holding an oblong between two fingers, and she took out a black and yellow Shake paper, and while I carefully held the chewing gum, she smoothed out the paper on her knee, but there were always some tiny tears that she couldn’t do anything about, just as she couldn’t do anything about the piece not smelling of licorice, and then we got up and walked off around the blocks of flats looking for a child: ‘See what we’ve got for you.’

The Bath Tub

I sat in the bath tub. Every time the water started to feel only lukewarm I pulled out the plug and let some out, there was a strong pull around the plug hole, and I blocked the water’s outlet with my fingers, blocked it and let it go again (rather like when you make a noise at the same time as patting your open mouth so the sound drones out in long waves), and when I let go the water rushed past my fingers and threw itself into the eager black hole; it was almost impossible to get the plug back in, it was pulled askew, but suddenly it gave a great jerk in my hand and made a loud slurping noise, and there it was in place. Then I would turn on the hot tap and fill up with warm water; it became too hot to have my feet under the running tap, so I crouched up at the other end of the tub while the fresh hot water dispersed the lukewarm stuff. There were blue dots and flounces on my bath cap, and the elastic was tight around my wet forehead, I was hot inside it, the window was steamy, now and then I took my hands out of the water and looked to see how wrinkled my fingers had become, and then I stared again out into the short passageway leading from the bathroom out into the long entrance hall, at the striped curtain hiding shelves with shoes and a bar with clothes hanging on it. The winter clothes were pressing against the curtain and felt as though they were alive if you went past and happened to brush the curtain. Suddenly everything became too alive, the room too close, and I felt afraid that some figure from the Bible would turn up, ‘Please will you bring me a glass of water,’ I shouted to my father who was walking about in the kitchen, ‘Please,’ I screamed. The room began to shrink around me, and someone from the Bible could appear out of nowhere. I was not me, or perhaps I was only too clearly me, and the same applied to the room: only too clearly. Whatever the room was, was growing out towards me, it was growing towards a saturation point of clarity and fullness, and when the room had reached bursting point, invisibility would burst into visibility: an explosion: a revelation: some slow moving person who would block the way out. Then my father came in and healed the room, ‘I only wanted to ask you to give me a glass of water.’ The doorbell rang. ‘Just a moment,’ he said. I squelched out of the bath tub and went after him, standing with fingers like a washerwoman’s, dripping, red and steaming, up against the striped curtain that the winter clothes were leaning on from inside, and a woman in a green velvet coat came into view in the doorway, her hair was dishevelled, her nose pointed, they whispered to each other as though I were asleep, and he took her by the elbow as though she were ill and slowly led her into the sitting room and shut the door on her. That was who he was going to move in with. She was going to sleep in our house. I asked why. ‘Because she’s so upset,’ he replied.

The Moon Crone

The Moon Crone was pulling a fish from her lap, its head hung between her thighs, she was standing with her back bent, pulling with both hands, her toothless mouth was twisted open and her features were distorted; she was crying out against the wind. No. She had teeth like a length of paling and was eating a man, he was on the way down into her, and the fish was on its way out of her, both in sweeping movements. She herself was on her way to the moon, and if you laughed at the sight of the fish between her legs, she would eat you – and you came out again as a fish. The man had laughed, and half of him had already disappeared, he was staring straight ahead with a pair of black eyes, and he would go on doing that until she chewed his eyes to bits, and when he next saw something, it would be as a fish.

A hunter, a little egg-shaped man, was standing with a raised harpoon which you could pull out through his sleeves where it had been fixed in a hole as tiny as the eye of a needle, and then there you stood with a polished splinter of bone in your fingers. The animal the weapon was being aimed at was missing. The Greenlandic figures were on a polished writing desk shelf, and the polished surface was ice reflecting them, and far away, at the edge of the table there ought to have been a bear prowling about or a hare jumping. There were two more hunters, one of them looked like this other one but seen at a distance – everything about him was smaller, further away.

The bird man was standing on his own, he was a mad creature with just a single wing hanging uselessly down at his side and flippers as feet, he had gone off into the mountains after having been turned out by the others, and there he had gone mad and been transformed into a bird. A hand without an arm was scratching his hair, it had emerged from his brain, and during the night it disappeared back inside again. When I wasn’t looking, the Moon Crone finished eating the man, pulled the rest of the fish out and started to eat someone else who had started laughing, and the part of him that was inside her immediately started working its way out as a fish, and the hunter threw his harpoon against the sadly empty table and fetched it back, or else he threw it right down on the floor and darted as quiet as a mouse across the floorboards, during the night the hunting ground was far bigger. They stood shining in the sitting room, they were made of bone, and it was best to place them in a circle facing each other so they had each other’s company, so to speak, and the Moon Crone’s evil ways got no further. And you could laugh out there in the sitting room.

The Red Bag

I sat at school together with The Others and turned into a building under construction, there was something of Daddy starting to blossom in my face, I turned my head in the same way as he did and looked around me, the lower part of my face was touching on his jaw. I walked up and down the empty corridor, in behind those brown doors was where all the lessons went on, here were my footsteps, which I kept quiet, on the other side of the swing door were the stairs I was to go up every morning for endless years together with The Others: the clumps, the groups, the people congregated on staircases in classrooms in the corridor in the yard, like bladder wrack, the floor covering was yellow and red and black, deep down inside a long hot wave began slowly to unroll towards the place where I ended, where there was no more wall that was me. ‘I met your mother and a man with a beard yesterday. It wasn’t your Dad,’ Lene had said. The Others were not to know, my father’s name was still on the door; if only he had left the car in front of the house so that everyone would think he was always there, but the white car was only parked in front of the house for that hour in the afternoons while we went for a walk, but people living in the road greeted him in a new way; if only he would come home from some journey and put down his dusty, light blue suitcase – which sounded hollow when you knocked on it and wasn’t made of leather but of some hard stuff, there were two blue straps inside to keep things in place in each lid, you didn’t lay it down when you opened it: it had to stand upright and it opened like a book; there were silk pockets for the smallest things – in the hall where it had sometimes stood rocking in the morning when he had come home from his travels while I was still asleep. Mother and Sten slept on a mattress on the floor in the sitting room, the sitting room was an invasive, flowing place which I had to take off from in the mornings, the sheet lay spread out on the floor in tongue shapes, there were still glasses of some liquid standing on the floor. When she told us that he was going to live with us, I kept on looking at her shiny red bag, which she took to work and then home again to me, and then my limbs started moving of their own accord and I stood on the bag, and my legs moved up and down in a slow spasm, I rummaged about with my feet and felt the things down in the bag, something down there sounded hard and split in two. ‘Not you as well,’ I shouted and stood knocking on a door with my hands. And instead Sten kept on carrying an oblong bag backwards and forwards between his apartment and ours and putting the strap of a worn leather bag over his shoulder and slipping it off his shoulder again and putting the bag down on the floor.

The Danger from Above

The bed spelled danger; hanging above it there were pictures of kneeling children; their prayers were the last resort: God could come drifting down at any moment.

The children were like porcelain dolls, white and plump, with splashes of red. There were only beds in these children’s rooms, and the children knelt by their bedsides in their long nightdresses. Their beds were dark like ours.

And like me, they prayed: ‘Dear God in our Heavenly Home, thank you for today, I’ve had such a nice day, now You mustn’t be angry with me if I’ve upset You and then I pray that you’ll look after all the grown-ups and little ones so I can sleep safe and well dear God in our Heavenly Home.’ Racing away on horseback pursued by wolves and now and again dropping some meat so the wolves stopped for a moment to eat it. The prayer was raw meat for God; repeated often enough, it would probably keep Him up there.

I slept in the middle, enclosed by Grandma and Grandpa; but that didn’t help matters; the danger came from above.

There was no God at home; but He was certainly here. And at home the danger came from the side; I slept alone there, and I had to make sure nothing stuck out from under my duvet; I had to lie as far in to the wall as possible, and besides, my night light was lit, and there were street lamps outside the window. Here there was the garden outside, all the lights in the house were put out and the blinds drawn. The darkness was intense and crackling; when I woke up during the night and opened my eyes the room was just as dark out there as it was behind my eyes, and I was not quite sure whether my eyes had been glued together so I couldn’t open them.

‘Will you promise not to go to sleep before me?’ I asked when we went to bed.

‘You needn’t be afraid,’ said my grandmother, ‘There’s an angel sitting at the head of the bed to watch over you.’

‘I don’t want one; promise I won’t be the last one to go to sleep.’

I lay listening to their breathing growing heavy, my grandfather towered up like a whale in the room; if he began to snore – with a sound like sheets being ripped apart – before my grandmother fell asleep, she would tiptoe in to the sofa and sleep there, or up to the guest room in the loft; there was a picture up there of Jesus riding sideways on a donkey, His feet dragging along the ground. My grandmother slept on her side with her hands folded under her head.

I could shake her till she woke up and ask with a feeble voice: ‘Are you asleep?’ for a limited number of times before she grew angry and said that she’d be too tired to get through the day tomorrow. I lay with my eyes wide open between the sleeping figures and listened to the whispering sound coming from above, a suffocating drape on its way down over the bed, and I said my prayers. The darkness was full of sand, it flickered and crunched. In time some narrow stripes appeared where the roller blind didn’t quite meet, at the sides and at the bottom; spadefuls of the oppressive darkness in the room were gradually taken away – I could go to sleep; God didn’t work in the daylight.

Christina Hesselholdt’s The Principal (Hovedstolen) was published by Munksgaard Rosinante in 1998.