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Chapters (21)
  1. Praise
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. CONTENTS
  5. IN A DEER STAND
  6. SUN DOGS
  7. HYGGE
  8. BY SYDVEST STATION
  9. BETWEEN OFFICES
  10. THE FAIRGROUND
  11. COMPACTION BIRDS
  12. PERSHING SQUARE
  13. HONEYSUCKLE
  14. ON NARROW PAVED PATHS
  15. INSIDE ST. PAUL’S
  16. THE FREEZER CHEST
  17. MANITOBA
  18. WILD SWIMS
  19. PUSHKIN PRESS
  20. ALSO BY DORTHE NORS
  21. COPYRIGHT

The first time they did it, him and Annette, was in her room next to the kitchen in Hasle. Nobody else was home, but she wanted the lights off, so it was lucky it was summer. He was able to push her far enough to the left on the pillow that the light from the window struck her. There she lay like a pale blotch in the midsummer night, and he removed her glasses. The stripped, absent face excited him, and while her gaze fluttered about trying to locate him, she told him she’d never done this before. Then he stroked her hair, until a faint expression of gratitude appeared on the face below. A small picture of the effect of his caress, and it made his erection so hard, he was forced to raise himself on one elbow. Then his hand down in her panties. Then the fuck. And he fucked her till her mouth became a gaping O and her black hair crackled with static against the striped bedsheet.

No, she didn’t really have a face until he engaged her, and she didn’t really have a face afterward. Yet somewhere in between there was a sweet blossoming, an identity squeezing its way out, a wet mouth, tears, passionate pain. He granted her a will, trained on him, and later he biked home through Aarhus, satisfied that he would keep her. And thus the years passed. He’d kept her, and God he had fucked her often. Sometimes when he was sitting under the honeysuckle in their yard in Risskov, watching her stare blindly at the robot​ 80mower, her face a bit flushed and swollen with fluid, yet still quite anonymous, it would hit him just how many times he’d fucked her. It was incredible that her face still seemed to exist only with his help. Her speech had improved, no doubt about that. Her attempts to act independently in the world, and the sudden fits of weeping that could drive her from the table, were both signs of individual character. But the rest of it, he thought, was a continuum.

81

ON NARROW PAVED PATHS

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THE FIRST OF JUNE, EINAR WAS DIAGNOSED WITH cancer. The second of June, Alice rang up their circle of friends and told them that Einar had been diagnosed with cancer, and to judge by his emaciated state he had nothing to bring to the fight, so it must be terminal. In any case it would be best if Einar, who had no wife or children, was admitted to a hospice as quickly as possible, that was Alice’s opinion. Her own husband had died in the hospice, “And those were his best days,” she said on the phone when her listeners had sat down heavily, on the sofa or in a kitchen chair, with a “Poor Einar.”