I moved into a rented room three days after my aunt died. My mother was too heartbroken to really notice. I took advantage of her condition to tell her I was going to be married soon. She answered strangely: It doesn’t matter who you marry.

I never really understood what she meant by that.

My brother kept his promise and moved back home to the room behind the cretonne curtain, and I forgot all about them – forgot about my home, and lived my own life.

But sometimes – when someone has left me, or I discover inadvertently in the eyes of my children a glimpse of cold observation, of merciless, unsurmountable distance, I take out my brother’s pretty little sewing case and slowly open the mother-of-pearl inlaid lid. Fight for all you hold dear, plays the worn old music maker, and an unnamed sadness swells inside my mind, because they are all dead or disappeared, and my brother and I no longer communicate.

Also by Tove Ditlevsen

ALSO BY TOVE DITLEVSEN

FICTION

The Faces

NONFICTION

The Copenhagen Trilogy

Childhood

Youth

Dependency

A Note About the Author

Tove Ditlevsen was born in 1917 in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen. Her first volume of poetry was published when she was in her early twenties and was followed by many more books, including the three volumes of The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), and Dependency (1971). She died in 1976. You can sign up for email updates here.

A Note About the Translator

Michael Favala Goldman is the translator of sixteen books of Danish literature and the award-winning author of four collections of original poetry. He lives in western Massachusetts.

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