Justine (7 page)

“That was a good catch we made there,” Balle said on the way home in the car. “It'll make for a good photo series. How will you show them?”

“I can provide for an entire settlement if it comes to it. There aren't many women who could catch three seals in one afternoon.”

“Nah, you're a cool artist.”

“I'm hungry.”

“I damn well bet you are.”

N
ow it's morning. He scratches himself. Gives me a lewd look.

“Keep your pants on,” I say. “Nothing happened.”

Yelp.

He groans, scratches himself a hundred places at once. Then he steps out and whistles while he washes.

Aren't you sticking around, man? Else, I'll have to work.

I don't say it too loud. He doesn't hear anything and leaves. I stick around.

T
here's a floating fuzz. It hovers, ascends, and moves straight to the right, ten centimeters, I think, maybe twelve, and then it hovers again. All of it. No matter how I approach things, it's the wrong way. I blow the fuzz that takes a decent flight of more than a meter, and then I need to drink more. Thinking makes me so thirsty. I think so much I've perpetually got to pee. Yet again. Every time I sit a moment and am about to have an idea, that's it . . . off to pee.

I find my telephone in my bag and call Marianne Fillerup at the National Gallery.

“Keep your pants on,” Inngili says in an authoritative voice, putting a lot of space between her words. The works are safe. They're currently up in my friend's attic. Fortunately. Marianne Fillerup groans.

I hate the telephone, that shitty apparatus, and switch it off before I end up dialing someone else. I need to pee.

A
ne sits on a bench in Enghave Park. She was pushing the baby in the stroller, but every time she'd let go, he'd wake up. She didn't get to do her shopping. Now she's tired of walking and parks the stroller in the shade where she can keep an eye on it. Soon he'll wake up, but that's okay.

“There's really nothing to say,” she says, “about Marianne Fillerup wanting to see how much progress you've made. She's responsible, after all.”

And she adds:

“I mean, you're not all that bright. What are you actually going to do?”

The last two sentences are the most accurate that've been spoken in a while. They're true. And relevant. I'm not all that bright. And: What am I going to do. I isolate the sentences in order to remember them.

“I'll pocket them,” I say, “these sentences.”

Ane's at it again, in the process of lifting the stroller cover to peek. She says:

“Now then, little man, you're awake?” She removes the cover. “You've had a good nap, love. Are you hungry?” She takes out her telephone and checks the time. “You slept for two hours. That's right, two hours,” she says, lifting the red-cheeked baby from the stroller. All in one movement. Now she fidgets the baby to her breast.

“I'm moving to a hotel here in Frederiksberg,” I say.

“What's that? In Frederiksberg? Can you afford it?”

“I can't stay at The Factory another day.”

“Yeah, I'm really sorry about that.”

“That's not what I meant.”

Of course I can stay at The Factory, I just might have to. What I'm saying is: I won't. I don't know. I can't. I can't fucking do it any more. When I say that, I get a sense of deep, deep depth. Can't is the empty space at the end of every branching possibility.

S
he prattles about Torben everywhere, at home, on Nørrebro, on the Bryggen wharf, and now she's talking about him again here in Enghave Park while she sits and nurses. He's apparently fed up with his gallery. They want him to participate in a group exhibition themed around
   
A Man's Answer to Feminism
. However, Torben doesn't like working with themes that way, Ane says, he's sure they're just waiting for an excuse to get rid of him because they think he's difficult. She's annoyed on Torben's behalf, and it's made worse by the fact that his gallery has also contacted her now. She thought they wanted Torben, but, as it turned out, it was Ane they were looking for. The gallery owner would like to see some of her things, just informally, you know.

“I'm telling you, Torben got weird when I told him that,” she says.

She tucks away the limp breast and removes the firm one.

“I just said I was on maternity leave. Obviously, I don't want to be in the same gallery as Torben. Nothing good would come of it,” she says.

V
ita's still not home, but I didn't expect her to be, either. I chose this exact moment. The vegetables in the box on the kitchen table, they're hers and where she's still an absence, have grown brown tops. They hang over the edge along the table's surface and yearn for water, which probably hasn't run in days to judge from the sink's dry metal and the calcium deposited there. And there stand the two glasses with their big, round red-wine bellies, their dark edges and the impression of lips and skin.

The couch is waiting in the living room. I lie down on it, down among the cushions.

S
omeone is rummaging around the fire site. I passed by and looked the other way.

I
n reality the settlement, which should've been, but no longer is, and which makes my stomach flutter, is a continuation of the work I created for the National Museum a year ago. I received permission from the museum's director to give a special tour four Saturdays in a row on the condition that I made it very clear that the tour was unaffiliated with the National Museum in any way. Before I began my spiel, that is, I had to remember to emphasize that it was an art project. That's what the signs should say: An art project.

The guests flocked to participate in whatever was happening with the Eskimos in the ethnographic collection.

“My father's mother, Inngili, was a great hunter,” I said, “and that was extremely unusual for a woman at that time. Back then it was mostly the men who hunted, but Inngili had made a pact with the animals: If they let her capture them, she would do it with hunting gear that was superb and beautiful. No animal likes being downed by inferior hunting equipment, and my grandmother knew that. Therefore, she made sure to adorn her harpoons and could easily come home with seven, eight seals in one day.”

People peered into the bright showcases that displayed the harpoon with the decorated shaft; the wood and the bone trimmings glowed. It looked so splendid behind the glass, the way the halogen lamp was positioned, it was entirely perfect. Wood and animal grease. And the years layered in.

“My grandmother's harpoon was stolen from her by a whaler named Wilhelm Löwe. Löwe also stole a small
   
ulo
. You can see it over here.”

On another wall hung the women's knives with their handles of bone and tooth.

“Herr Löwe sailed with a whaling ship from Holland. He was the ship's captain and had sailed most of the world over. But he also came to Greenland, where the whaling was good at that time.”

I drew the group over to the
   
ulo
display case and pointed out an especially beautiful knife with a fine tooth handle.

“My grandmother's knife,” I said, “shouldn't be hanging here, but that's what it's doing, unfortunately . . . There was always a celebration whenever a foreigner came to the settlement where my grandmother and grandfather lived, and there was dancing and singing at my grandparents' home. When Löwe landed, my grandfather was on a hunting expedition, so when Löwe fell for my grandmother, he had free reign. She was so clever and different, he thought, different than the other Greenlandic women. Löwe pursued my grandmother the two days his ship lay in the harbor. What exactly happened, she knows only, but when the whaler again pulled anchor, my grandmother's
   
ulo
and one of her harpoons was gone.”

The guests listened and nodded and saw Inngili before them, the beautiful Greenlandic woman with all her hunting gear. I told about my great grandfather with his bushy brows and grim words, he'd been a priest in the colony, hallelujah. Herr Löwe succeeded in raping a twelve-year-old girl before he scampered off with my grandmother's possessions. Löwe had to leap from the edge of the ice to escape my superhero of a grandmother. She pursued him with my grandfather's harpoon and struck him in the thigh. She was wild and frothing at the mouth. She wanted to murder him. The swine. Another time I said that Löwe had eaten himself sick on pickled auk. My grandmother had to care for him until he was recovered, at which point he hightailed it with the swag. Those tales were invaluable, more than priceless, they were . . . they were . . . indescribable.

V
ita came and spied me between the kamiks and the kayaks. She'd insisted on knowing when the tour was taking place, she'd love to see it. Ane was there as well, and the curator Ulla Lund arrived together with Marianne Fillerup.

The words leaped and danced from my mouth, it was a song. I levitated, in front of those women I absolutely levitated.

“You own the floor you're standing on,” said Vita. “Thank you for including us.”

Her gaze sucked me in.

“You're so radiant. And wonderful.”

“Yeah, she's good,” Ane said. “You should see some of the other things she's done.”

For the occasion I'd put a thick burgundy ribbon in the bun on top of my head.

“Thank you for a fine performance,” Ulla Lund said. “Have you met Marianne?”

“Where do you get your material?” Marianne Fillerup asked.

“What were you thinking of in particular?” I asked.

“Oh, all of it. But maybe we should get together some other time and talk?” she said.

We arranged a meeting in the glow of Vita's pearly skin, which radiated in my direction.

Vita's ankle-boot heels clicked sharply on the way to the bar where we were going to drink a celebratory beer. She slid on the cobblestones. I caught her. Ane and Vita seated themselves in a corner, they had no difficulty talking, Vita's reserve was entirely absent. They chatted, laughed at the same things. Ane asked Vita for stories from her time at the academy. Vita was Venus. She placed her hand on my thigh beneath the table and talked about professors, about sculptors and materials and projects. Everything was in its proper place. Ane and Vita talked. I ordered beers. What I'd said during the tour and the reactions and the custodian who'd stopped and listened, and the light in the room, Lund and Fillerup and the sound of the floor beneath shoes, and the dry, stable air, and the perpetual awareness of Vita's scent, it all came rushing back.

T
he clock empties its contents into the streets and alleyways and into the factories. It flows away in the shape of hours and days, and nights are long, nailed in place, I watch time rise. Soon I'll nearly be up to my neck in weeks, and everything has never been so far away. I'm drowning? Here comes the ivory-colored wax floating along. Past. And the true to life bones. Floating right past. And over there. Huts and blankets and skins are rocking in the water. Here the Eskimos come swimming. Their hair is matted in thick tufts. Their smell is harsh and strong. The women with hanging breasts and nearly toothless mouths paddle. The men stand further in along the coast, distant and perhaps hostile. Two children disappear over a field, race down to a river. The trout hover like torpedoes in the restless time between my legs. I step onto a stone. Day. The night has been reduced to a turquoise rim on the horizon. I focus intensely on the sky. Now shouts are sounding in the distance, numerous and piercing. The great hunters have returned home from the catch. The women are already dragging the fat seals along, laughing and shouting. The children come running with the great catch clapping on lines. They're all together now. Inngili opens her mouth and shows her four teeth. She slices a strip of liver dripping red turning black. I chop the whole into small pieces and send it away with the stream. And here comes my great grandfather striding along, slightly out of chronological sync he marries ten wildlings at once and bids them welcome to Heaven. Tiny, bow-legged women and men. Turn around and depart. In the opposite direction. Away, Inngili. I can't take anymore. I can't take anymore. Farewell.

F
arewell? What remains, then, if not that which has endured so long it's perpetual? What's the alternative? Yes, who's the alternative? The me that is now is formless, not exactly dissipated, but flailing around, thrashing, reflecting off windows and surfaces. Everything changes so quickly, I can't grasp it before it's gone. Is it just light and movement that speeds off to wherever? If I use aperture eight and perhaps attain a hundredth part, can I reach it then?

I'd like it to see me. For it to position itself over there and tell me what it sees when it looks at me. I don't care what I am. Just that it shows me how I am, from all angles, at all moments, no buts about it. Now I just need a camera.