Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) (7 page)

He goes into the little kitchen out back to get a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray. He has put his things, scissors and oil, on the counter in front of me, and while he’s away the fat lady comes out of the Laundromat across the street. I’ve seen her a couple of times standing in the store picking out pastries with another fat lady. She waves to me. I stick my hand out from under the cape and wave back. I think the hairstylist may be right, that it’s some kind of terrier. I can see her talking to it as they go down the street together. Valium, I think to myself, and the sun beats down on the pavement.

THE HERON

I WON’T FEED BIRDS, BUT IF YOU MUST, THEN YOU SHOULD DO SO IN Frederiksberg Gardens. There are tame herons in Frederiksberg Gardens, and the park authorities have placed the park’s benches at some distance from one another so as not to attract too many birds to one area. There are problems at the end of the park where the alcoholics sit, particularly with ducks, but I never go that way, and you can see the herons everywhere. Of the heron itself, one can only say that from a distance it looks impressive, but this doesn’t apply when you get close up. It’s too thin, and tame herons in particular look malnourished. Most likely all that bread gives the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens bad stomachs and is to blame for their not making an effort to fly. Last winter I saw one slouching on the back of a bench with its long, scrawny neck. Its feet were completely white and it barely even reacted when I walked past. The way the wind ruffled its neck feathers made me want to go back and sit down next to it. It was the way the suffering had to be drawn out like that, the way herons never really muster the enthusiasm. But I won’t touch birds, alive or dead. They shouldn’t be played with, and you should take care never to touch other people with your infected hands. If a bird is dead make sure not to come into contact either with it or with its excrement. Disposable gloves must be used, and the bird should be picked up with a plastic bag, the way you pick up dog shit. The bag should be sealed and disposed of with the household garbage or else buried. How difficult is that, with all the knowledge we have available?

In order to avoid herons in large numbers, as well as the strange man who often stands on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion and feeds them herrings while claiming to be able to talk to them, I tend to walk instead around Damhus Pond. At Damhus Pond whatever a heron might have to say is meaningless. Besides, herons have difficulty colonizing Damhus Pond because of the nearby houses, the foot traffic, and all the cyclists. It’s easy to see from the detritus littering the water’s edge that the pond has been ruined by cyclists. There are many out-of-place objects there, and as well as bikes they once found a dismembered female body in a suitcase in the pond. An entire woman in little pieces put into freezer bags. The suitcase was found by someone out walking his dog. Or, presumably, it was the dog that found it. Credit where it’s due. There are always lots of dogs around Damhus Pond, and I can picture this particular dog very clearly as I walk along the path. It’s a golden retriever and it’s fussing in front of the suitcase, which has drifted halfway up onto the shore. The golden retriever has a secret urge to roll around in carcasses, preferably those of birds or mice, but how is it to tell the difference? I can picture it, and I can imagine its owner at the moment the realization kicks in. I imagine he remembers the moment the suitcase was opened whenever he is getting ready to take a trip, and likely even the dog was never the same again.

Things are contagious. Things want to get in through the cracks. That’s the way they are, and I know from a former colleague of mine that the woman was killed and dismembered in an apartment in the Vesterbro district and that the girl who lived in the apartment downstairs and who was studying veterinary science moved out not long afterward, even though her upstairs neighbor had been apprehended and sentenced for the murder. Who could blame her? She probably kept thinking about all the times she had passed him on the stairs. Most likely she felt the building was contaminated and even the slightest sound reminded her of the night she heard something going on upstairs. But something is always going on in the night, there are always smells and sounds: pigeons rustling in the attic, creatures on the move, and the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens can sometimes be seen, looking like gray poultry shears in the sky over Valby. The heron is an awkward bird in flight, and the Heron Man on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion would do well to tell the herons so, seeing as how he’s always babbling away at them like that.

Although my apartment is on Frederiksberg Avenue I willingly walk the extra distance to Damhus Pond to escape the gathering of birds, and as for dismembered bodies I’ve walked around the pond most of my life without ever finding one myself. When I was a child, my friends and I would run around the pond because our physical-education teachers at Vigerslev Allé School told us to do so. I still see children who look like me and my best friend, the dentist’s son, Lorenz, running around the pond. Whenever a tall, skinny boy runs past me, I picture Lorenz racing to come in first. I tend to stop and smile when I see kids running around the pond like that. But after going around it myself I no longer want to stop and smile at anyone, certainly not the young women with their stony faces and big baby carriages. They always come in flocks, great flocks of mothers, and they stir up bad feelings in one another, so none of them will even look at you when you walk past.

I step aside into the grass, thinking about the dog, the suitcase, the body, and how the veterinary student lost her swagger overnight, and how it doesn’t take a doctorate to have kids. I have known hopeless individuals to have children. It doesn’t require much more than a certain degree of sexual excitement, at least in the male, and at any rate it’s not the women with the baby carriages who are in charge of the biology of it. If anyone is in charge of the biology it’s God, but they probably made Him step aside, too. No one at the age of those mothers believes she needs eternal life, and even the concept of giving way to oncoming traffic seems unreasonable. But it’s important to me, and sometimes when those mothers have passed by I look back at them and wonder what it would be like if they swelled up. They’d begin to expand, and eventually they’d expand so much that they could no longer keep themselves together, and then I picture them exploding: shreds of flesh in the trees and along the shore, blood spattering on the swans, the ducks, and the coots floundering in the grass. There’s a rustling in the grass, the kind that makes dogs want to roll on the banks. I hear the rustle, and I hear the babies screaming in their carriages. I picture Lorenz skating through the mud, racing on around the pond on his pale, thin legs, long since dead, eaten up from within by sick-cell divisions, cremated and interred into the ground, while I keep walking, through the dead birds and the dead mothers, to get to the baby carriages. I have to be careful not to lose my balance, and then I reach my hand down into one of the baby carriages left behind, my hand with a cookie in it, and the child inside looks up at me with eyes full of astonishment. I pick it up. I lift it high into the air, and the movement causes its pacifier and its rattle to fall to the ground. I wish the child no harm; all I want is to lift it into the air before putting it back and walking home through Frederiksberg Gardens.

The heron was there last winter. Sitting with its beard blowing in the wind and its long pale toes clutching the back of the bench. Incapable of fright, tired and sallow in its gaze, smelling of the mites that lived in its underfeathers, and I should have sat down next to it.

KARATE CHOP

SHE HAD ONCE BEEN ADVISED TO LISTEN CLOSELY TO WHAT A MAN said just when he began to sense a woman was showing interest in him. For unknown reasons, most men at that very moment give off important information about their true nature. This was what she had been told, and she had known men herself who, in the middle of an intimate conversation on a very different subject altogether, could say:

“You should know I’m not an easy man to live with.”

Or: “I can be such an asshole at times.”

Mostly, she had considered this to be self-deprecation, if not a form of politeness, and if she did not take it seriously it was because she had not understood that a person could be in possession of disturbing knowledge about himself and still have no wish to change. For that reason, and because she lived for the idea that everything had some deeper reason, she never believed what these men said about themselves. It was hard for her to acknowledge that their words really were intended to be warnings and that her failure to listen would end up costing her dearly, but she went so far as to agree with them when afterward they said:

“It wasn’t like you didn’t know or anything. I told you how I was.”

And indeed they had, yet still the problem recurred with the next one, and the next one again, and every time the man sensed she was about to make herself vulnerable to him, he told her something disturbing about himself. Annelise would smile then and say:

“Oh, stop it.”

But they never did.

When she met Carl Erik Juhl, what made her fall for him, in effect, was his long list of disturbing traits. Working with children with psychological problems and learning difficulties, she was used to meeting adults who were disinclined to acknowledge their own weaknesses, and in that respect Carl Erik’s frankness seemed redeeming. He had been called in for a meeting at the school about her sessions with his son, Kasper, who was in seventh grade, and almost at the very instant he stepped inside her office Carl Erik confessed that he had a temper, was something of a coward and a poor father to boot. Annelise pushed back her chair slightly so as to get a better look at him. And there he was. His face was round, his hair thin and curly. He looked out the window behind her, and his smile was so sweet her heart turned somersaults.

What she wondered now was whom to blame for the wounds her relationship with Carl Erik Juhl had inflicted upon her. She turned her body in front of the mirror in the bedroom and lifted her right arm on which was a bruise. It was quite unacceptable of him, yet at the same time her not listening to what he told her was suspicious. Not one of the traits he had ascribed to himself that day in her office had he failed to demonstrate in practice.

She sat down at an angle on the edge of the bed and frowned. There had to be a reason, and one had first to look to oneself to discover what was wrong. Her upbringing had been decent enough, though one time when she was about ten and had fallen off her bike and ended up in the hospital, her father had not even come to visit. Not caring for the smell of hospitals, he had stayed home instead. It was by no means unlikely that some encoding of basic insignificance and a tendency to neglect one’s own needs had taken place then and left its mark. Or perhaps it was her relationship with her brother. Arne had been good at sports and wouldn’t bother playing with her unless she was able to take the ball from him at soccer. Their mother had always been so quiet, too, and yet to no avail, Annelise thought to herself and pulled the comforter up over her shoulders. Judging from the students she treated, not many children escaped a beating of one sort or another. But that didn’t necessarily turn them into thugs, masochists, and murderers. There had to be more basic psychological traits, perhaps even gender related, that could account for her behavior. Carl Erik’s too, for that matter. He was always falling short, and she could never make an issue big enough. It was no good.

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.