Dorthe Nors - So Much for That Winter

The man has a beard.

Medium height.

The face attractive, and the mouth now opening.

The man says he could hear someone singing.

The man says he crawled out to have a look.

The man’s got a banjo on his back.

Minna points at the banjo.

The man looks at the banjo as if it weren’t his.

The banjo’s his.

The banjo and he were on their way to Årsdale.

The man plays banjo during the tourist season.

Guitar’s more for the mainland.

The man introduces himself.

The man says his name’s Tim.

Tim seats himself at Minna’s side.

Tim sets the banjo up against Minna’s backpack.

Tim takes hold of Minna’s hand.

Minna’s hand is wet and cold.

Tim squeezes the hand a little.

The ambulance isn’t out of the picture.

The medicopter isn’t either.

Tim raises his index finger.

Tim says Minna should follow it with her eyes.

Tim’s finger oscillates, but

Minna has her eye on something else.

The penny’s dropped:

Tim’s on Bornholm.

Tim’s the cousin.

Tim knows someone with a rehearsal space in Kastrup.

The rehearsal space is cheap.

Minna can’t stop looking.

Tim’s family resemblance seeps out.

Tim does look like Lars.

Tim’s beard is just more modest.

Tim also looks gentler.

Tim seems nice.

Tim’s just about sweet.

Tim is Lars, like Lars was at night.

Tim is Lars without deadlines and Linda.

Lars was a porcupine.

Lars was a pillbox.

Tim’s warm and hairy.

Tim’s soft and shy.

Tim looks at her worriedly.

Tim says that she’s bleeding from her head.

Minna says, Who isn’t?

Tim says she’s freezing, but

Minna isn’t freezing.

It was me who sang, says Minna

and then she shoots, she shoots him the mermaid eye.

So much for that winter,

I thought, looking at the last crocuses of spring;

they lay down on the ground

and I was in doubt.

Chewed out an entire school because a single sentence bugged me

and drank my hot chocolate, sweet/bitter.

Worked,

considered traveling somewhere I never imagined I’d find myself

yet stayed where I was

and banged on my neighbor’s wall,

was in doubt, but sure,

was insecure,

stood still by the window,

let my gaze move from running shoes to wool socks

and lay down on the bed.

Was attacked by a cross between a Rottweiler and a Great Dane in Søndermarken, survived.

Yelled at five dog owners in down jackets, YOU’RE ALL SICK!

Survived.

Ran my route (cemetery, Frederiksberg Gardens, Søndermarken, home) faster than ever.

Propped my hands on my knees and howled at the floor,

Why this now too? Hasn’t it been enough? Hasn’t it?

I howled

and found I’d sustained injury from dog attack on the left side of my tongue,

but surviving, always surviving,

that’s the way I am, not the kind you can knock out,

with tongue before the mirror,

eyes open,

my face a grimace of gums and longing

and ice water for dinner.

Pondered what it meant to be happy.

Decided to test what would happen if I were happy,

really happy.

Was afraid to be disappointed.

Cleaned the fridge,

thought about what he’d written

and kept returning to the word self-confidence, wrote that down too,

wrote it down again

and went to the supermarket.

Took in the bottle of wine the neighbor had placed on my mat:

Excuse the noise, Love, Majbritt, it said; so that’s her name, I thought,

and set the bottle atop the fridge,

moved it under the sink,

I’ll drink it for Pentecost,

for Pentecost when I’m happy,

really happy.

Woke at the sound of my mirror falling down, and that cannot be good.

Salvaged the glass, but had to go down to the backyard with the frame, and that cannot be good.

Considered crawling under the blankets

or going on a bike ride

or making a change— gills, paws, antennae—

but could not.

Ascertained that when the wind’s in the east, Valby’s Siberia,

roughly just as empty

and full of loose dogs running from hedge to hedge, no doubt after dead birds.

Went for an evening walk on Queen Dagmar’s Boulevard.

Heard kids practicing the flute through half-open windows

while blackbirds up on the chimneys sang to themselves

and to the dogs by the hedges

and me on the street beneath Langgade Station.

Woke an hour early,

made instant coffee,

drank it,

stood by my kitchen window the same way I stood by my kitchen window when I lived on the island of Fanø and went down to the beach every day and crushed razor shells underfoot: Why do I live here? I’d wondered

and couldn’t have known that one day I would stand in a flat in Valby and look at the crooked tulips in the backyard and wonder the same thing.

Wrote.

Went for a walk in the cemetery, where everything promises spring, and stopped, as I often do, by Vilhelm Kyhn’s grave, and Kyhn would always stay the same, rendered in bronze and grown into the birch tree that gnarls above him,

one day I’m going to have to take a picture of that tree,

one day it’ll be something I can show from time past,

I resolved and pilfered a twig,

watched the news,

watched my face go past in the hallway,

watched my feet in woolen socks far below

crushing nothing.

Hard wind from the east and everything smelled of southern Sweden.

Tidied up my bulletin board,

went for a run through Søndermarken and through the cemeteries, for now it is spring, and it’s tough to be happy on schedule, and rarely does anyone get what they deserve, yet now it is spring.

Took notes that later might prove useful, and everything’s dicey, but quiet.

Thought of the people you’re allowed to like, the ones you’re not allowed to, and the ones you really do anyway but never mention a word about.

Gave my secrets a good going-over,

and I haven’t given up hope, I still believe that things can open and become soft and alive, German bunkers, Berlin walls, abandoned abattoirs, it’s only a question of time and it’s all well in the end, I thought in line at the grocer’s

and stopped then on the way home outside Blankavej #25, first floor, where someone has a Mao figure standing on the windowsill and when I walk past, I sometimes think he waves and smiles, while other times it looks as if he gives me the finger,

it depends on my belief in things, and if it were always positive, I’d be crazy, I thought,

pleading with myself to raise my head, maybe it wasn’t at all his intention to make it sound that way,

so forget it,

forget the view that day across the canal,

forget the winter-gray roofs,

the way the mitten got snagged on the banister,

the hoarfrost and the sort of things that remain,

shrug it off, forget it,

the injustice of it all,

for now it is spring.

That which was yesterday in bud, today is in bloom: the carnations on my table,

the territorial blackbird on the roof, the faint grumbling from my mouth and fridge.