Dorthe Nors - Karate Chop - Stories

Annelise gazed down perplexed at her right hand, and as she did so she thought about how, when they had started going out together, Carl Erik liked when she was drunk. He wanted her with him out on the town and encouraged her to flirt.

“There’s no one in here you couldn’t have,” he’d say, looking proudly around the bar.

On occasion he picked out some poor guy, preferably with a slight handicap if anyone like that was around, and when Annelise came back from the bathroom he would bundle her onto a bar stool next to the victim and whisper:

“This one’s down on his luck. Show him a good time, it’ll cheer him up.”

She would dance with this other man, or allow him to buy her a beer. She had thought of it as Carl Erik’s way of paying her a compliment. Now it was obvious to her that it was something else altogether. There must be a hundred ways of rolling out the red carpet in front of an ailing store, Annelise thought. Giving a woman away to a cripple is only one of them.

But she had known many men like that. Many men like those reptiles in the zoo that could puff up their faces with fanciful color and raise themselves up onto thin toes and rattle. Every woman in the world would meet one sooner or later. It was all part and parcel. But she was no good at not loving them, even if there were no obvious reason to do so.

She looked into the mirror again and let the comforter slip down her shoulders. She saw how her breasts and hair hung limply from her body. She saw a red mark beneath her collarbone, and maybe the problem was at root sexual. Maybe she just didn’t understand how to deal with male sexuality. As a child, Arne had kept porn magazines under his mattress. Some times when he was out at soccer practice she lifted the mattress and flicked through them. As she gazed at the glitzy images, feeling a tingle inside, she thought a woman would have to love a man very much to put that thing into her mouth, and she thought too that the man would have to love it very much to want to put it inside the woman’s mouth. She found the anal business odd. There was something anatomical about it she still had not fully understood. In her view it was about little more than the instrumental power of the male organ. Because it could be inserted into openings, it had to be inserted into openings. In her hometown there was a man who went around sticking his thing through gaps in fences and the wire baskets on bicycles. Instrumental power, she thought to herself. Technical pleasure ought never to be underestimated as an element of male sexuality, and it wasn’t that she disliked sex, it just wasn’t all kinds of sex she liked, and she could still feel Carl Erik inside her.

Now he lay naked under the comforter and they would never go to bed together again. Never, for now she hurt all over and was unable to see what she had done wrong. But what had happened was that Carl Erik’s son Kasper had been staying with him that weekend. Things had not gone well, she sensed when Carl Erik had come over just before dinner. Kasper had said something about the sessions Annelise had been having with him, but first she and Carl Erik had eaten dinner and shared a bottle of wine, and then they had fucked, drunk more wine, and taken a shower, and it was all fine until she made to dry Carl Erik’s back. That was when he became annoyed about her having to touch everything and not leave things alone, always poking and meddling and sticking her nose into the slightest thing. It was as though she were never satisfied with the knowledge she had, he yelled at her, and the last thing she remembered before he blew up at her was the sentence All that crap you’ve been telling Kasper, for instance. And at that point she had asked for the crap to be expounded upon, which was what then happened in the hallway, the living room, the kitchen, and the bedroom.

She was perfectly willing to admit that she had lost confidence in her choices. She kept on mostly because she was scared of giving up on her urge to be happy and simply content herself with peace and quiet. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, she considered that she had most likely seen her worst and her best now. She had been down on all fours, on the edge of her nerves, naked and bound and temporarily insane at the time of the crime.

She climbed gingerly back into bed. There was Carl Erik, unconcerned by her still being awake. His hand was next to her face, clutching at a corner of the comforter. It looked gentle lying there. A little red across the knuckles, but there was nothing wrong with its outline, especially not if Annelise put her eyes slightly out of focus. She considered its shape and thought about the lines; everything you wanted to see but which in actual fact was not there. Everything that should have been but which never became, and this was important to understand. Not only in respect to herself. It was something she could put to use with the children at school. She recalled that as a child she had been heavily seduced by the black line drawings in coloring books. They were done so well she always wanted to fill in the empty spaces with crayon and felt-tip. Behind that burning desire to color in the drawings lay the creative human’s longing to give life, and, not least: to make the drawings her own. In a way, it was like stealing preconceived ideas. The drawing could never be lifelike, and for that reason you reached a point where you began to draw outside the lines.

She had observed that children only seldom showed the colored-in drawings in their coloring books to their parents or other adults. Presumably because they were such poor indicators of the child’s creative abilities and demonstrated all too clearly their less flattering traits: laziness and lack of confidence to really get below the surface of things. Annelise’s gaze fell once more upon Carl Erik. One of his kind — a man — was part of the idea preconceived for women. More than that, any individual you happened to meet was nothing but a potential, an outline to be colored in and assigned content. She had read about it in respect to young girls and their propensity to over-function — the need to change, control, expound upon. But you can’t do that, and eventually you pick up the felt-tip with the most in it and color everything in. Maybe that was why he hit her? Maybe her bruises were just a way of coloring outside the lines? Maybe the reason he turned her onto her stomach, pressed her into the mattress, and fucked her from behind as she sobbed and felt her legs grow heavy was to make her real and living by being careless, and seen from the opposite viewpoint what she did afterward while he was asleep was the same, outside the lines, outside them all, even if the result as it lay there in a mess of blood and comforter seemed to be anything else but alive.

HE REMEMBERS HIS GRANDMOTHER, BUT EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED before he was born comes from his mother and Aunt Ellen. They were full of stories, and right from the beginning they wanted to tell them all, and when they did they would look at him as if to encourage him to learn them by heart. Aunt Ellen, for instance, told how one time toward the end of the war they were baking vanilla cookies, but then the mailman came. As he turned into the farmyard, Grandmother got down on the floor and began to scrub the linoleum with her ass in the air. Grandfather was sitting in the parlor studying aerial photos of Leipzig and his mother had gone out to the rabbits in the cowshed. It was nearly Christmas and the mailman winked at Aunt Ellen and said something about the vanilla cookies smelling good. Grandmother sat like a mermaid on the floor and said with a giggle that she couldn’t get up again. The mailman had to help her while Ellen tried to close the door into the parlor with cookie dough on her hands.