The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 38

  “The little Mic Fuck. I’ll deal with him tonight.”

  “Ethnic slurs don’t exactly become you, darling Daneka.”

  Daneka reared up her head—which, at this point, was crimson.

  “Listen to me, Kit, and listen well. I don’t care what some fucking doorman has to say about me and my doggie habits. If he says I like to take long walks with my dog—or with anybody else’s for that matter—if he has pictures of me and fourteen dogs—or as many donkies—and they’ve each got a dick up my ass … if I then tell you it’s a lie—that the pictures are phonies, fakes, digital tricks—who’re you gonna believe, me or the pictures? Huh? Be very careful how you answer this one, Kit. Very careful.”

  Daneka was hyperventilating. Kit had long ago realized that sooner or later his little white lies would add up and either come crashing down on his head, or necessarily coalesce into one big black lie. This was it: he either wiped the slate clean and started over with her, or he lied. Either way, he knew, they were finished—and that here’d be no second spring for him in Svaneke. There’d be no reward for his labors. If he told her the truth, there’d be only a ten-hour trip back to New York in Scandinavian silence—and a lichen to retrieve. If he lied, he—unlike the lichen—wouldn’t want to exist just for the sake of existence—at least not under her sun. They might push on for a few weeks, a few months even. But he, inside, would be dying—and she, intentionally or not, would be killing him. He looked at her. He looked deep into eyes that seemed already to have glazed over as they looked back at him.

  And he lied.

  The glaze miraculously disappeared. She smiled her Daneka smile and put her hand on his arm. Her hand felt warm; his own arm, to him, ice-cold. “Let’s go then, shall we, darling?” Kit started up the car. “The turn is just up there on the left.”

  Kit moved the car forward. Within seconds, he saw the cobblestone lane they’d taken at the time of their first visit to her mother’s place, and turned into it.

  The same tractors stood at attention in exactly the same attitude of country kindness of five days earlier. Disconsolate, Kit considered how wrecking balls in New York in as much time could easily have made a train station disappear; how lives could’ve been disrupted if not deleted; how deals could’ve been struck; how the foundation could already have been poured for a new luxury high-rise for those on easier terms with hard cash. All you needed was the kind of people who could spoon-feed directions to make it happen quickly, efficiently, on their kind of clock—namely, with hands of steel and a rock-steady tic-toc—and no desire to split hairs over truths or consequences.

  He spotted two slightly familiar little girls in pinafores and golden braids. Daneka rolled down her window as Kit brought their car to a stop.

  "Hej, piger! Hvad har I for i dag?"

  "Hej igen, Daneka. Ikke noget særligt. Vi leger bare," said one of them.

  Then the other started to explain. Kit inferred, from the elaborate way in which she sketched it all out with her hands and feet that she was talking about their game. But she also apparently stuttered, couldn’t seem to find the words fast enough, and was growing increasingly frustrated.

  Daneka, he noticed, was once again wringing her hands, even if in her lap and out of everyone’s sight but his own. He looked at her face. The muscles in it—strained tight as those of a beaten fighter—staggered in an effort to maintain her smile. She was a pugilist struggling to stay alive—fighting her opponent, but also herself and everyone else in the arena.

  The girl noticed it and thought she, herself, was the cause. A stutter and an occasional, mangled syllable turned into word porridge as she began to cry and hug herself, rocking up and down from the waist. The other girl, incapacitated, looked on in horror, then also began to cry. The first looked at the second, then down at the road between her shoes. She was making a puddle, but not of tears.

  She ran off and the second followed. Daneka scratched the raw spot on her arm, which started to bleed again—and yet she continued to scratch.

  Kit drove on slowly until he spotted Mrs. Sørensen’s house, then pulled the car over and parked it. He turned off the engine and took the key out of ignition. Daneka then spoke to him as if out of a crypt.

  “You go ahead. I’ll follow in a minute.”

  Chapter 64

  Kit walked up to the front door and knocked. A woman answered. He’d seen her only once before, but Kit had a reliable memory. And yet, as he looked at this woman standing before him, there was only the ghost of a resemblance between her and the woman he’d seen a week earlier.

  “Hello, Kit. Is Daneka not with you today? Is she perhaps out walking the dog?”

  The coincidences were beginning to make Kit skittish. Or did she, too, know or suspect something about Daneka’s after-hours peccadillos? He wasn’t sure he wanted to probe—not now, not here in what had fixed itself in his mind as a special place even before he first saw Daneka’s special place.

  “Hello, Dagmar. She’s in the car—resting. She’ll be in shortly.”

  “Resting at this hour? She should get more sleep. Even dogs, once in a while, need a little respite from the night. Please come in,” she said as she pulled the door open and craned her head and neck up to give Kit a kiss on the cheek. “Can I make you a cup of tea or coffee?”

  “Tea would be nice. I’ve already had my quota of coffee for the morning.”

  “Of Daneka’s coffee? Pffa! That’s not coffee. That’s cow piss. Let me make you a real cup of coffee.”

  Kit chuckled, though he didn’t like the sound of what was brewing—even if she hadn’t yet put the water on to boil. Perhaps, now that they were alone, he could discover what was really going on between Daneka and her. He probably didn’t have much time and would have to come to the point quickly, directly. He followed her into the kitchen.

  “Can I ask you something, Dagmar? Something rather rude, rather direct—something that may be none of my business, but which I need to know?”

  “Of course,” she said as she spooned three mounds of freshly ground coffee into a filter. “I have no secrets to keep. Life’s too short for secrets—too precious and precarious. Secrets, if you really want my opinion, are an incredible waste of time and energy—as much for those keeping them as for those trying to figure them out.”

  “What’s up between you and Daneka?” Kit asked bluntly. “This hostility, I mean.”

  “What’s at the core of hostility between any two people, Kit? History. Sometimes chemistry, biology, even anatomy. But in my experience—” she began with a coy smile that, because of its familiarity, left Kit weak in the knees “—chemistry, biology and anatomy usually lead either to armistice or to something a little less hostile, if you know what I mean.”

  “Though not … always to … happiness,” Kit stuttered, but only because he was trying desperately to re-gain his composure. The smile first; but also how she bent her neck just so: he’d seen that smile and that angle once upon a time. The combination struck him as something out of a fairytale—and now just as fabulous. He looked back out through the kitchen door into the living room. How had he missed it the first time? Candles were burning everywhere.

  “History,” he repeated—and the word had a whole new meaning for him. It wasn’t just history between nations and peoples or religions and philosophies that drove the world to madness and mayhem. It was, in microcosm, also family history. And if each family had its own unhappy history, Kit reasoned, then the sum of those histories might ultimately add up to a general malaise in the human condition—particularly if part of that condition was a shitty climate.

  “Have you ever read Hegel, Kit—or our own Søren Kierkegaard?”

  “No, I haven’t,” he answered, turning back into the kitchen and stepping up to the counter.

  She placed a maternal hand on his hand. “Promise me you’ll read them, at least a little something from each, before we next meet.” She then looked him straight in the eye. “And we shall meet again,
Kit. I promise you,” she said patting his hand. She removed her hand but not her stare as they both heard the front door open and close. “We’re in here, Daneka—in the kitchen,” Mrs. Sørensen announced as she finally let her eyes fall away from Kit’s.

  He could hear the approach of footsteps. They sounded tentative, wary even. When her face finally appeared in the frame of the doorway, he was struck once again by the resemblance. The difference between their two physiognomies could be counted in years only. The mother’s face was the daughter’s face—and both seemed to have weathered unnaturally, savagely, in the storm of the previous five days. Whether it was the revelation of new truths or the further concealment of old lies that had done the damage, he couldn’t know. He had only the hard evidence of their faces, of the expressions they exchanged when they greeted each other, of the tiredness in both their voices, of the despair, desolation and loneliness each had bequeathed to the other in the space of those five days.

  Kit’s mind suddenly shot back to his first trip, as a young child, to the Philadelphia zoo. He remembered seeing there a pair of big cats behind the iron bars of adjoining cages. Having exhausted every other means of threat at a big cat’s disposal, they stared at each other—but their pupils told the truer story. It was not their caged fight that had done them in, but something with a much longer history.

  Out on the savannah, before their capture, they could easily have coexisted. In fact, they had coexisted—for years. Had found mates. Had raised litters of cubs who played with one another in pretend-fight, pretend-hunt, though never venturing out of sight of one lioness or the other. The two lionesses had hunted together, had shared prey and domesticity, had even groomed each other when their mates were elsewhere for days at a time—doing whatever mates did when they were away for days at a time.

  Until, that is, the snares found them—and soon after the snares, the poachers; and with the poachers, trucks and cages. Their cubs, meanwhile, had run behind bushes at the first incursion of machinery. From this vantage point, they watched, trembled, then growled their pitiful little lion cub growls as men’s hands surprised them from behind; picked them up by the tail; dropped them into canvas bags—never to see lionesses, or their savannah playground, or even Africa, again.

  As mothers heard the screams of their kidnapped cubs, their paws, in snares, clawed the air for poachers’ blood—scratched and clawed as if the air itself could be made to bleed and pay for this unnatural crime. As the air gave them no satisfaction, they broke their snares. The first showed how it could be done; the second followed her example. They both then ran to their screaming cubs. They ran as no gazelle could run, as even no cheetah could run. They ran like sprinters whose hearts were halfway to breaking from the stress of the sprint—never mind the cubs—until a feathered dart shot from an elephant gun found them both in mid-sprint and knocked them to the ground like a pair of silly bowling pins.

  The rest, Kit knew, was history. And all of that history could now be read in two pairs of pupils: in the pupils of caged lionesses then; in the pupils of Daneka and her mother, now.

  “I was just making Kit a cup of coffee. Would you like one as well?”

  “Sure, Mother.” Daneka walked out of the kitchen and sat down at the table in resignation. She was now well beyond sighs as she let her eyes wander out to the greenhouse where they stayed fixed. A few minutes later, Kit arrived with her cup and a pitcher of cream.

  “Tell me when, darling,” he said.

  She watched him pour the cream in a steady stream into her coffee. Mesmerized by the flow, however, she said nothing.

  “Darling?” Kit said.

  “Yes,” she said with a sharp intake of breath. “That’s good. Thank you.”

  Daneka was still stirring her coffee when her mother came out of the kitchen and sat down. After a long moment of silence, Mrs. Sørensen reached over and put a photograph in front of Daneka. It was, apparently, the picture Daneka had been looking for in the car. She’d left it not in the cottage, as she’d thought—but here, in her mother’s house. That her mother was willing to remind her of the fact, yet without commentary, Kit saw as a peace offering—as did Daneka.

  “I’m sorry, mor. I shouldn’t have been so forgetful. I was distracted. Forgive me.”

  “There’s no need to ask forgiveness,” Mrs. Sørensen said without even a hint of recrimination in her voice. “I took it out of your purse yesterday when you weren’t looking,” she lied. “I wanted to look at it one more time—to decide whether it was the right one for Margarette.”

  Daneka appeared thankful for the reprieve. Whether or not her mother’s version of events was true, she was clearly grateful she wouldn’t be made to pay. Kit noticed that her lower lip was beginning to quiver. As much as he might’ve wanted to console her in that instant, he felt this was not his opportunity, but her mother’s. As if reading his thoughts, Mrs. Sørensen rose up out of her seat and came to her daughter’s side. She then knelt down and took Daneka’s hand in her own.

  “My girl,” she said. “My poor baby girl.”

  For Kit, watching the spill of someone else’s pain or grief was not a spectator sport. He stood up and went upstairs to Daneka’s former bedroom. As he walked up the stairs, he heard the sobs begin—as well as the Danish. The only word he recognized—as Daneka repeated it over and over again—was ‘mor.’ Kit stepped into Daneka’s former room and sat down on the bed. He wondered what happy stories this bed and these walls could tell—but also, when and where it had all gone wrong. He looked up at her bookcase, at the names and titles along the spines. He recognized all of them, thought how different the contents of this bookcase were from what she had in New York, and how—.

  His eyes had wandered to the top shelf where he saw a single video. He stood up and reached for it. The title was in English; the face of the woman on the cover quite familiar. She looked lovely in her black dress, single string of pearls, black hair swept up from a swan’s neck, and foot-long cigarette holder. But then, to Kit, she’d always looked lovely—even without all the accoutrements. He wondered what particular fascination this woman—and this movie—might’ve had for Daneka as a young girl. Maybe he’d still get a chance to ask her; maybe not. But now, he also understood just how deeply her mother could dig. Dagmar Sørensen was a smart woman. But as with all smart people, she could combine intelligence with ruthlessness, and the result—if she wished to launch it—could be a stinger missile to the soul. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” indeed, Kit thought. He would never again be able to hear Audrey Hepburn’s rendition of “Moon River” or walk past the building on Fifth Avenue without remembering this relic—this piece of New York and of Americana—in a little girl’s bedroom in a cupcake of a house in a fairytale village on a remote island in the Baltic Sea.

  He put it back exactly where he’d found it; pulled out, at random, one of the tomes in a collection of books by the same author, and whose name stood out clearly, embossed in gilt: H. C. Andersen. The text was in Danish—and so, to him, unreadable. The illustrations, however—all by Vilhelm Pedersen and Lorenz Frølich—were unmistakable. He was able to leaf through and see some of the faces and scenes he’d first seen in his own childhood. There was Karen, of “The Red Shoes” … the ungainly, gray cygnet of “The Ugly Ducking”… Little Tiny in the story of the same title, asleep in her walnut shell … the steadfast tin shoulder … the little match girl … the wild swans. And then he saw her: the little mermaid. With the ubiquitous billboard ads for the Disney-animated version of the story as his only recent point of reference, he’d forgotten how authentically beautiful and sad one little mermaid could look. He could tell from the smudges on the page that a child’s fingers had turned it many times; had held it while touching the cheeks of the mermaid and the eyes just so. He couldn’t look any longer—and so, closed the book and put it back.

  He glanced one last time around Danek’a bedroom, then walked out and back down the stairs. At the base, he peeked around the corner and
across to the niche where he’d left Daneka and her mother sitting. Mrs. Sørensen had, in the meantime, moved her chair around and placed it next to her daughter’s chair. Daneka’s head now lay in her lap as Mrs. Sørensen stroked her hair.

  Kit sat down on the bottom stair and waited. This was not his moment—or his place—to intrude. He’d wait. However long it might take, it didn’t matter. He’d wait. His own timekeeper was now a clock without hands. If Dagmar could somehow bring Daneka back into the light, he’d make time do his bidding—for both of them.

  Chapter 65

  It wasn’t too long before he began to hear pleasant murmurings from the other side of the room, and he looked up to see the two women embracing. Never had he been happier to see a pair of arms around Daneka—happier even than when those arms had been his own.

  As he walked over, Daneka saw him immediately and extended a hand. “Group hug?” she asked with an ironic smile.

  “What the fuck is a ‘group hug?’” Mrs. Sørensen asked, intentionally giving the “r” a strong Danish trill to indicate she really had no idea what they were talking about. Both Kit and Daneka bent double in laughter. In all the years they’d known each other, Daneka had never heard her mother say ‘fuck.’ She was actually surprised her mother even knew the word. Although he’d not been privy to their conversations in Danish, Kit found it almost unimaginable that Dagmar would swear in any language. To hear her pronounce ‘fuck’ as if it were just any old word struck him as amusing beyond words.

  “Did I say something funny?” she asked, looking genuinely surprised.

  Rather than answer in words, Daneka threw her arms around Kit’s neck, reclined her head on his shoulder and smiled back at her mother. “Isn’t he a darling?”