My aunt’s cheerfulness declined, and my mother was getting tired of sitting with her. When I was home, she pleaded with me to take her place. The window in the bedroom faced a closed courtyard with a bicycle shed, and on its roof roosted cats, raising their loving yowls to the heavens. The cafe’s back door faced the courtyard, and the drunkest guests were always let out that way. When I opened the window, the smell of vomit and cat urine wafted in to my aunt, but it wasn’t as bad as the rotten smell that had begun to spread from her bed. I don’t think she noticed it herself. She looked terrible. Her bright red gums were always exposed, even when she was sleeping, and her yellowed, emaciated fingers continually groped the comforter, as if they were searching for something. Twice a day a nurse arrived to give her a morphine injection. Soon after she had it, she started whispering, without turning her head, unaware whether it was my mother or me beside her. I had to bend right over her to hear what she was saying. The oppressive smell took my breath away. She whispered about clothes she had sewn for my mother’s dolls, and about their experiences as young girls. When she wanted to laugh, it turned into a violent coughing attack. ‘Do you remember,’ she murmured, ‘when you hid the barber in the clothes closet? If Niels hadn’t left so quickly, he might have suffocated.’ Niels was my father. I started laughing, because I laughed a lot in those days. Then my aunt realized she had the wrong audience, and she quickly started whispering about all the dresses she had sewn for me when I was a little girl.

My mother was sitting in my bedroom, sobbing into her apron.

‘How much longer?’ she asked. ‘God help us, may she soon find redemption.’

Maybe I could have comforted her if she had expressed herself less bombastically. To me it seemed to make her grief appear unauthentic. In my judgmental mood and at my age it also seemed abnormal for her to be so tightly bound to her sister when she had a husband and children.

Not long after, my father lost his job again, and my mother scraped margarine on our bread and we had porridge three times a week. It was a terribly cold winter, and my aunt still refused to die. They thought I was still packaging tin boxes, because, thanks to my editor, I was still able to deliver my weekly twenty kroner to my family.