Authors: Erik Valeur
“I’m not adopted,” Orla said. “My mother just couldn’t take care of me that first year.”
“Of course you are.”
“Did you ever find your biological parents?”
“I have their names and numbers. We visited the orphanage, and there was a girl named Marie
…
She gave me the names. I’ve called them, but I always hang up before they answer the phone. I don’t have the courage.”
Severin suddenly lay down on the bed and fell asleep, the wine doing its job.
After thinking about Severin’s story for some time, Orla noticed his friend’s black address book on the bedside table. He picked it up and opened it. For reasons not wholly clear to him at the time, he felt no sympathy for the thin boy from the yellow apartment buildings. He knew exactly where Severin would have listed the two most important numbers in his life—under
M
and
F
. How banal.
He went to the dorm pay phone—it was 3:00 a.m.—and looked at the little book with the six-digit number, which, according to Marie, belonged to Severin’s biological father. It was strange that the girl seemed to have access to such confidential information. The man lived in the Copenhagen area.
The telephone booth at Regensen was half-concealed behind the green door leading to the courtyard, and Orla saw the linden tree through a narrow window. He dialed the number; it took a long time before someone answered. “Yes?” a drowsy man finally answered.
“Was it a good screw?”
“What?” the voice said, a little more awake. “Who is this?”
“Skodsborg 1961. Was it
nice
to just walk away and forget all about the kid?”
“Who is this?”
“Was it nice to just walk away and become father to another son and another woman’s children?”
“What the hell!?”
“Do you ever think about your first born? Would you like his number? No, I guess you don’t. We ought to just leave it alone. We need to forget the past, right?” Orla slammed the receiver down. He leaned forward and looked into the courtyard. In a few hours the girls from his dormitory association would begin setting the table for the Sunday lunch under the linden tree. The Salvation Girl would laugh. Her eyes were always clear and wide; she reminded Orla of the Sørensen girl, the one
who’d
asked him to eat the blue licorice candy.
He had only slept a few hours when he woke late the next morning. He walked down to the pay phone wearing a robe and dialed the other number from Severin’s book.
“Hello, this is Pia,” said a rather young voice.
“Is Susanne your mother?”
“Yes
…
Who is this?”
“Just tell her I said hello, and that she forgot a child. A long time ago, but nevertheless. In Skodsborg. Just tell her she forgot a little boy far, far away—but that he’s still waiting for her. If she’s got time, that is.”
Orla hung up. He rested his forehead on the window. He saw Severin out there under the linden tree, suffering, hungover. The Salvation Girl leaned over the table as she sliced a hunk of sausage on a thick wooden cutting board; she laughed, putting a hand on Severin’s arm. Then they sang a harvest psalm, their voices distant. Orla remained in the booth, listening. He could barely hear the words:
The leaves are falling everywhere
.
But leaves don’t just fall. They wilt and fade and no longer protect you from the rain.
Then he dialed a third number, and this time he heard his mother’s voice—a little startled, as though
she’d
had a crazy premonition that something terrible was about to unfold—but Orla let the silence hang in the air, imagining the distance between them: approximately 3 miles, 805 yards, and 23 inches—if none of them moved.
He listened to her breathing. “Hello?” she said.
And then, with trepidation: “Is that you, Orla?”
He put a hand over the receiver and then removed it. A gob of spit seeped from his puckered lips into the shiny, black plastic funnel; he glanced at the water lily, and the eye stared back at him, terrified. He couldn’t ask the question. The girl under the linden tree laughed; she sang like an angel. Later that day he invited Severin and the Salvation Girl to his room. She had been raised Catholic, fleeing her home in Søllerød, her only possessions a plastic bag stuffed with Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath albums. It hadn’t ruined her good spirit, though. As they walked up the stairs, she sang about Jesus and all the joy he would bring those who asked for forgiveness.
“Let’s make a confession booth for all of us guilt-ridden Regensen residents!” Orla shouted.
Severin looked at him with his strange non-smile, and perhaps it was this peculiar idea that prolonged their doomed friendship for a few weeks.
Out of plywood, the three friends built a booth as tall as a man, cut a hole in one side, and covered the opening with a piece of thick black cloth. They took turns sitting on a stool inside the box, listening to each other’s confessions.
They were only allowed to respond to the confession with the phrase “I understand.” (The exact phrase that idealistic childcare workers and social commentators would’ve said regardless of the sin committed.)
Severin and the Salvation Girl told anecdotes about their sinful drinking at the dormitory, and Orla intoned, “I understand.”
But when his turn came, the atmosphere in the room suddenly changed. With his chunky nose sniffling and his thick lips moving, Orla described sights so strange that both Severin and the Salvation Girl began to find the game frightening. Not even a Catholic runaway had experienced anything like this, and finally they both declined to participate in any more confessions, citing essay writing and headaches. Orla, filled with a rage he couldn’t control, knocked late one Friday night on Severin’s door. “You need to confess—now!” he growled. Severin saw Orla’s red eyes and went along with him. This would be the last time, and he would tell the secret he understood Orla sensed.
“You remember I told you about my father’s horse,” he said when
he’d
positioned himself in the box.
The consoler behind the curtain did not reply.
“Something happened to that horse that I didn’t tell you, or rather to the boy who rode it. Kjeld, the janitor’s son
…
” Severin hesitated for a moment. “He was the ugliest, meanest boy I’ve ever met, but he was crazy about that horse, and when we took it to the wetlands to graze, he plodded along after us. One day I gave him permission to ride the horse. I don’t know what got into it, but it ran like hell. At full speed. Kjeld clutched the mane, screaming. Right by the rushes in the creek, the horse stopped abruptly, and Kjeld flew into the air, landing on his head on the big boulder. You know the big boulder there. He lay in the grass, his eyes closed, and I remember looking at him. He had blood on his cheeks and forehead, and I just stood there, feeling so much joy. It felt good. He was in the hospital for three weeks before he was discharged, but he wasn’t the same person anymore, and a couple of months later, he passed out and was taken away. A few weeks after that we learned
he’d
died.”
He went quiet for a moment. “Like Hasse,” he confessed.
Now Orla’s voice rose in a sharp, commanding tone as if Severin had placed too heavy a burden on himself. “I understand. It wasn’t
your
fault at all.”
“I haven’t come to the point yet
…
I knew that horse was feral. I knew Kjeld might get hurt. I’d tried to ride it myself, after all. I wanted it to be a real Indian horse, but I too had been thrown off. It was wild and completely unmanageable. I forced it to stand still until he could get on, then I made sure he held the mane tightly, so he would be able to ride for a little bit, and so the horse would have time to speed up before tossing him off. I
hoped
he would get hurt, and I’ve never wished for anything that strongly.” Severin cleared his throat. “At least that he would get hurt. But that he would die
…
”
It sounded as though he was about to start crying.
“You wanted him to die.” The consoler did not ask a question.
“I remember
…
he was like
…
just like a little boy lying there,” Severin cried.
“I understand,” Orla said. His voice through the curtain was clear. “I understand.” There was no doubt he understood.
Like Hasse.
“I learned that day that sometimes you feel like killing someone—and that you might do it too,” Severin said. “This isn’t something you normally tell anyone.”
“No.”
“Did
you
ever
…
?”
“No.”
The curtain fluttered a little, or maybe it was just the breeze from St. Kannikestræde.
Severin stood and left the homemade confessional. He never returned to it, and a month later, he started dating the Salvation Girl. The confession booth stood unused in a corner of Orla’s room.
Or so he thought.
But Orla still had a story, and he no longer had anyone to tell it to. In place of Severin, he put an old Tandberg device behind the curtain. It could record nonstop for three hours. If anyone could have accessed the tapes (they were responsibly locked up in a big oak cabinet), they would have been even more shocked than Severin and the Salvation Girl. Because, alone in the dark, Orla the Weirdo saw no need to reconcile the skepticism of the world or avoid its judgment. Now he was the Father, the Sinner, and the Condemner; and when everyone else in the dormitory was asleep, he glided smoothly from one role to the other as he spoke to the old recorder:
I understand
, said the Father. And the Sinner shouted,
Don’t forsake me!
But there came no response, and the Condemner sat in the background making sure that the silence was documented.
Forgive me
, the Sinner whispered.
The Father remained silent.
Orla heard the silence—recorded onto the spools, where it wound around itself and went deeper and deeper, yard by yard.
No man is an island
, the Father said.
Orla answered,
I want to confess that I’ve asked Almind-Enevold whether he can get me a position in the ministry when I graduate
. Then there was silence for a long time, and you could almost see Orla smile and drink from his wine.
I can start this summer
.
For about a minute the room was quiet, the silence broken only by the muted whirring from the rotating coils of tape. Then the Father’s voice:
You have sinned. But you have paid for your sin by losing your friendship with Severin, and one cannot ask for more
.
The following weekend, Orla took his leave without telling Severin or the other residents about his plans. The driver of the moving company had a daughter who loved puppet theater, and Orla gave her the peculiar confessional booth.
Two months later he began working as an official in the ministry then considered the finest and most honorable: the Ministry of Justice at Slotsholm. This was the first step on the career path of any ambitious attorney.
He moved into a room on Østerbrogade with a view of Hotel Østerport and the train tracks. He came home late at night and rose early in the morning. During the weekends, he practiced a new ritual: around midnight he sank into his armchair, relaxing completely. Inch by inch he cleansed his mind of internal disturbances, peeling off first the words, then thoughts, and finally feelings, until he found himself in total darkness under a smooth mother-of-pearl cupola that felt and sounded like the inside of a conch—like the one his mother had once given him when he was a child, which retained the sound of the surf from the sea far out west.
Only at this point would he calmly open the lid to his subconsciousness and let all the images from Glee Court and the wetlands stream into the room. The torn butterfly wings, the eye on the water lily, the black hole in the dead giant’s face that disappeared into the darkness. Lighting three candles, he would sit in this state, in the same position, until the last wick had curled up, extinguished. He let the images dance around his lit face while the whistling wind became whispering voices—distant and powerless—and he let them vanish.
Orla often finished the ritual by calling Severin’s biological father or mother, and the voices he heard on the other end of the line were sleepy, tinny. He never said a word, simply left the receiver next to the extinguished candles for thirty seconds or so, then hung up.
One night he lost consciousness and slipped into the same invisibility
he’d
mastered in his high-school days. A puff of wind put out the three candles in front of him, and he suddenly woke and saw himself sitting there, alone in a chair, hunched like an angular black bird. At that moment he turned ice cold inside and couldn’t breathe: the terror exploded deep inside him; panic rushed through his nervous system; somebody had left him alone with himself, inside his own body, and, even worse, he couldn’t get out. He couldn’t live.
He leaped from the chair and ran around, bewildered, touching the walls, his hands shaking, emitting queer little sniffling sounds
he’d
never heard before. He was two individuals, locked into one—and his head was about to explode:
no, no, no—no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!
He heard the panicky sound of his own heartbeat and the wings that desperately thumped against the glass.
Slowly, the claustrophobic pressure lifted from his eyes, and he sank to the floor exhausted. He couldn’t feel his arms.
The incident repeated itself a couple of weeks later, and this time his reaction scared him so badly that he turned to a more outward-facing ritual. In the beginning he masturbated in the darkness of his room—without moving or touching himself, just on the power of imagination, thinking about the girls working in the department. After a few months he was so good at it that he could do it in the bus on his way home from Slotsholm, sitting by the window with his face turned away, staring at the pedestrians who passed by unaware. He imagined the young law intern bent in an awkward position over a desk, in a powerful embrace, and he would come before the bus had made it past Hotel Østerport, sometimes even before they’d made it halfway down Bredgade.