The Summer of Ellen Read online

  I took five kroner for the most successful ones, and ten for those where I’d drawn the same couple screwing on two pieces of paper. When you rolled them over each other with a pencil, the asses moved up and down, or you could get the dick sticking up.

  I also drew trees and leaves, but mainly houses.

  From all sides and angles. Sketches and hard lines. The church. The school, which was the only three-story building in the town, with finely carved cornices and drinking fountains of gray granite with troll heads, and eagles and edges of finely painted grapevines under the eaves. The butcher’s yard and the furniture factory with its almost one-hundred-foot-high brick chimney.

  The bike wobbled through a pile of lost gravel on the path where the road divided itself at the cluster of small farms. I was going too fast, but the brakes didn’t grip like they should have. The blocks were so worn that it was metal being pressed against the tires, and I had to stick the toe caps of my shoes into the asphalt and steer the bike into the ditch, where it bumped over rocks and knolls, finally coming to a sharp stop in the knee-high grass.

  “Who the hell are you . . . a little asshole?”

  Anders was standing in the wide driveway on the other side of the road, glancing at a point a little to my left, grinning quietly from ear to ear. Happy. He had dropped the wheelbarrow loaded with bags of feed and stuck his large, restless hands into his pockets. He was almost bald, and a disease had made the skin on his forehead and under the long stump of beard red and scaly. When he scratched hard under the cap, white flakes sprinkled down around him like a microcosmic snow shower.

  I got off the bike, wincing slightly. I’d received a few unwelcome knocks to my balls and scratched my shin on the pedal. Unfortunately, the rear derailleur also seemed to have taken a hit.

  “So come on, then, you.”

  The dog appeared behind him, on stiff legs. Soffi. A medium-sized, black-eyed bitch with a short, greasy coat that barked angrily at everyone, but was always ready to reconcile quickly if you rubbed her behind the ears. Her teats were naked and swollen, so there were puppies somewhere. Or there had been recently. Anton usually put down the entire litter by whacking them in the neck with the back of an axe. It was difficult to get puppies off your hands, and the dog ended up skinny and exhausted.

  “I’m here.”

  “For a lot of days . . .”

  I smiled.

  “Yes, Anders. For a lot of days.”

  He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a shard of glass that he held up to the light. Red.

  “Beautiful. Did you find it today?”

  He nodded eagerly, closing his hand around the clear red glass and letting it slide back into his pocket.

  “Where’s Anton?”

  Anders smiled broadly at his wooden clog shoes, rubbed his neck. When he, on the odd occasion, met your gaze, his water-blue eyes were filled with a happy astonishment that reminded me of Jørgen’s four-year-old sister when we snuck her a wine gum or half a raspberry jelly pastry.

  “He’s inside.” He bent over the dog, kissed her muddy snout and blew into her nostrils as the animal wagged her tail with delight.

  He’d forgotten me again, but that was how it was. Anders had the uncanny ability to disappear in the middle of a conversation. Not physically, but more of a kind of gliding in and out of focus, like a defective piece of photography equipment. His huge hands moving restlessly over everything in reach in the meantime. Animals and tools, belt buckles and the knees of his pants. He grabbed the worn handles of the wheelbarrow again and straightened up. Pushed it across the yard to the pig house. I leaned my bike against the gable wall, sat on my haunches beside the dog and shook her lightly on her greasy neck.

  “And what have you done with your puppies?” I said. “Have you been a good dog?”

  The fur on her stomach was stiff and tangled with dried milk, the teats tender, so the puppies were probably lying atop the dung heap with crushed skulls. I bit back the disappointment in me and went over to the back door.

  “Anton!”

  I remained standing on the flat staircase where the brothers and everyone else banged the dirt off their shoes and rubber boots before carefully placing them in a row in the hallway. It smelled of cow and pig, and grease fumes from meatballs and boiled potatoes. The kitchen table was wiped with a not-very-clean cloth that hung over the kitchen sink, and although it was tidy, almost barren, dirt was still plastered along the floorboards and tiles and behind the stove. When Mom occasionally stuck her head into the house of her uncles-in-law, she inspected the kitchen with an index finger, running it over the range hood, on the lamp, and in one of the pots to conclude dryly that the place lacked a woman. The last one had been my great-grandmother, but I didn’t know anything about her. She’d died many years before we moved to town. All that remained was the oilcloth with coffee stains on the table in the dining nook and the steady, stammering clock over the door to the living room. Time at the brothers’ passed slowly, flowing thickly like the honey or resin or tar pits that had once trapped saber-toothed tigers and dinosaurs, preserving their bones for posterity.

  Both Anton and Anders were born in Great-Grandmother’s room, which backed onto the living room, and according to my father, it was a true miracle that the boys had managed to escape from their mother’s womb, because she was a woman who held on to her sons. Since then, they’d been left hopelessly on the farm of their birth, where they’d grown up with four older brothers, a living mother, and a dead father.

  “There you are, Jacob.”

  Anton waved at me with a palette knife in hand. He was so tall that he had to dip so as not to hit his head on the door frame. The house wasn’t built for men like him and Anders, and it had apparently never occurred to them to add to the height. As they grew so much taller than their mother, they must have hunched more and more as they went from the living room to the kitchen and back to the living room again. In contrast to his brother, Anton had a lot of hair on his head, carefully combed with water in the early morning and maintained during the day with a comb that he walked around with in his back pocket. Once upon a time, he had resembled Marlon Brando, said my mother. Not anymore, not completely at least. But he was still handsome in a John Wayne kind of way. Broad shoulders and a stocky upper body.

  “You can stay with us for a while, can’t you? You’re not too busy for a pair of old codgers like us?”

  “No, of course not.”

  He smiled, grabbed my hair, tousling it roughly. He believed it was too long and said so to me often enough. When I was younger, he used to shake my hand in his until my eyes welled up and I had to wrestle myself from his grip.

  “Do you want something to eat before we get started? There’s a fried egg left.”

  I shook my head.

  “I ate at home.”

  “Well, then.” He nodded and walked back into the kitchen. Let the egg, fried potatoes, and onions slide from the pan onto his own plate before sitting down and tucking in.

  “You can put your things in the bedroom.”

  He was the uncle my father resembled the most. Actually, much more than he looked like his own father. A little genetic hop, especially evident when you saw them from the side. The same wide nose, heavy jawline, brown eyes and dark brown hair. Even when taking into consideration my father’s unhealthy swollen and chronically reddened cheeks, the physical resemblance was hard to escape, despite him doing what he could.

  My father didn’t like Anton.

  He’d whisper, “Momma’s boy,” when Anton passed by Feed Stuffs. “That’s what happens when you grow up under your mom’s apron strings.”

  I went in, put my backpack on the floor of Great-Grandmother’s room, and skimmed the short bed of dark polished mahogany. She had given birth to six children in it, and it was here that she’d taken her last breath. The mattress had been changed since then, and was now light blue and crackled electrically under a yellowed flannel blanket.

  “Jacob.”

  Anton was standing in the doorway.

  “You can start by digging up the potatoes. And put a couple of bags out by the curb now. Svendsen’s wife came by twice yesterday asking for them, and she’s . . .”

  Anton stopped midsentence, settling for waving his hand in an irritated manner. I’d discovered that wives could have that effect on him. Especially the ones who liked to talk.

  I retrieved the pitchfork and a few buckets from the stable, knocked a little sticky clump of soil off the bottom of one and headed for the kitchen garden on the other side of the middle stable. The long, winding rows of potatoes and asparagus, blue-green silver beets and little red cabbages with smooth, cool leaves were mainly the work and responsibility of Anders. As were the dense raspberry bushes and fruit trees in the chicken yard. I set the pitchfork into the earth and stepped on it, pushing the shaft toward the ground and loosening the potato plant so the earth-scented tubers could be glimpsed in white-yellow flashes along with fat, pale-blue and red rain worms and threadlike strings of fungus. I coaxed and tilted a little more with the fork, then began to pick up the potatoes from the sandy soil. It was a good yield this year. The potatoes were large and smooth, and there were a lot of them. The bucket was already more than half-full after plant number two.

  “That looks good.”

  I straightened up and turned toward the narrow, trampled garden path to where a woman had stationed herself, arms crossed. I hadn’t heard her coming. Hadn’t even registered the movement outside of my field of vision. But she was standing there for what had apparently been a while.

  She was darker than most people I knew. Blue e
yes that seemed lined with black, but probably weren’t. No makeup on the rest of her face. Her dark brown hair hung loosely, falling almost to her waist. Long, floppy trousers and an old man’s button-down. Her suntanned feet were stuck into a pair of open-backed wooden clogs. Her feet were dirty, as if she usually walked barefoot. On her fine collarbones hung a white mother-of-pearl mussel shell on a leather cord.

  She had to be from the commune. One of the hippies.

  I’d been there once with Jørgen, who went to buy a guitar but didn’t dare cycle out there on his own. So I was there when he reluctantly handed over his eight crumpled ten-kroner notes and in return received a beaten-up Spanish guitar covered in stickers of peace signs and communist slogans: brother, the time has come! power to the people. It was winter, and the living room we were standing in was cold and dark, smelling of wood fires, cigarettes and bitter tea. Lying directly on the glazed tile surface of the coffee table were crumbled slices of white bread beside a ceramic mug and a few dirty glasses with the dregs of juice at their bottoms. A curled pack of butter and a few greasy knives. The floor was raw concrete, like in a stable, scattered with frayed, colorful and filthy little rugs lying crookedly and on top of each other in several places. The sofa was covered with a huge crocheted blanket. My mother would have blessed herself.

  The woman nodded at the potatoes. “Can I take some?”

  “Sure . . .”

  I stepped aside slightly so she could walk past me and to the bucket, where she bent down and lifted some of the thin-skinned large tubers into a braided shopping net. She was wearing loads of bracelets. Some were braided black leather strips, but most were delicate and thin, shining silvery in the sun. Her scent was unperfumed, strong and frightfully exciting, despite my having no idea why.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” she said. “Are you just here for the summer vacation?”

  She worked fast with her hands, the bracelets jingling and jangling on her slim wrists with every movement. And when she stooped, I could see half of one of her breasts under the loosely buttoned shirt. There was neither undershirt nor bra, and the little pert breast jumped animatedly every time she moved.

  “Kind of,” I said, tilting another potato top. It was a relief to have something else to look at. “I’m helping out here for the summer. Just until I start high school.”

  She sent me a sideways smile, took a potato and rubbed a piece of the fragile peel off with her thumb. “We have a vegetable garden, but it’s . . .” She sighed dramatically. “We don’t understand how to do it. The salad is rotting, and Karsten, my boyfriend, tries to scare away the grubs with old urine. But now everywhere stinks like a men’s toilet, and we’ve no potatoes at all.”

  “Mmm.” I didn’t know what else I was supposed to say. I knew absolutely nothing about vegetables—or boyfriends and girlfriends, for that matter. It was a strange word to use at her age. Boyfriend. It sounded like a boy who stuck his hand up under a girl’s shirt in the back row of the movie theater. Or like having sex on a creaking single bed under posters of ABBA.

  “He’s over there.”

  She nodded toward the fence, where a guy was walking over to the cows with Anders. Ragged denim shorts and a bare, tanned upper body. His shoulder-length hair reminded me of the men on the covers of those books about the last Mohicans. He straddled the fence and headed for the cows, who flocked curiously around him.

  “He thinks we should get one,” she said, nodding in his direction. “A bull calf that we ourselves can fatten up. Or a cow with a calf. He’s started to build a brick box out in the stable.”

  “Okay.”

  Karsten, grinning widely, waved in our direction, bent down, and stroked one of the cows on its chest. He said something to Anders, but the woman had turned toward me again, smiling.

  “And what are you going to do, then? After high school?” she asked. “Do you know already?”

  “I’d like to be an architect,” I said, and she nodded, her brow furrowed in concentration.

  “The new Utzon?”

  A cloud moved in front of the sun, and a buzzard took off out over the field with a clumsy flap before finally beginning to work itself up with regular, rigid wing beats. She shielded her eyes with her hand as she followed it up in the pale-blue sky. Her hair was gently lifted by the wind, and then it felt as though something broke in me. It wasn’t something that hurt, just a weakness that finally surrendered, and for a moment it was difficult to breathe all the way down to my chest, and I wished she’d look at me again. Would turn her head in the same way and say it once more.

  I actually had Utzon hanging on the wall of my room at home. A full-page cutting from the newspaper Stiftstidende about his work on the opera house in Australia. How he’d had all the white tiles sailed from Sweden to Sydney, and that the entire interior was pink granite. Pink granite! I had no idea what that looked like, but the words alone were simultaneously hard and soft . . . and that was what I wanted to do. Build houses in pink granite or green topaz with black tropical trees of the kind I had read about in King Solomon’s Mines. Ebony with color like charcoal gray and green bamboo and mahogany, with grains of solidified dark caramel. Divine, flawless surfaces.

  There was a shout from over by the cows. The young man had gone farther into the field, a tail of animals following him, and now he was surrounded by large bodies. A heifer rose clumsily onto her hind legs, and would have fallen on top of him if he hadn’t taken a step back at the last minute. He yelled again, throwing out his arms to keep his balance. Then he turned around and tried to escape between the cows and to the fence. The heifer rose again behind him, and this time its hoof struck him on its way down, so he took a huge stumble.

  Anders roared and cussed. Slapped the big, smooth body with a flat hand until he had broken up the flock and could help the bronzed man up onto his legs. He limped a bit on his way over to the fence.

  The woman with the dark-blue eyes kept her mouth shut. There was a wild, forbidden laugh in her eyes.

  “They do that sometimes,” I said.

  “What?”

  I turned my back a little, rummaging in the almost-empty potato bucket as though I were looking for something. A bisected worm bled its entrails over my fingers, and a rolling, red-brown centipede darted down between the hard tubers. I lifted a few potatoes out of the bucket, found it and mashed it into the earth with a satisfying crunch using the tip of a stick.

  “Trying to, you know . . . It’s in heat. So you have to be careful when you go in among them.”

  She glared at me briefly, confused before the penny dropped.

  “You’re making fun of me,” she said, sneaky laughter still in her eyes.

  “Unfortunately not.” I threw the potatoes back into the bucket and grabbed the fork again. “That heifer wanted your boyfriend.”

  Now she laughed properly and it made her look even younger. Like a girl of sixteen. It was confusing, but neither better nor worse than before. I liked her both old and young. In fact, I was almost sure I’d think she was beautiful no matter what form she presented herself to me.

  “We really shouldn’t be living out here at all,” she said. Straightened up, and brushed the soil off her hands. “It can be fatal to people from the city. Do you laugh at us a lot?”

  “All the time,” I said. “There’s not much else to do around here.”

  “No?”

  The wind lifted her long hair again, and in that moment, I decided that she had to be one of the most beautiful women on the planet.

  “Well . . .” She turned around and started walking. “I’d better go take care of the wounded warrior. It was nice meeting you.”

  “Goodbye.”

  She walked quickly, even began to jog slightly with the heavy shopping net dangling unevenly from one hand, and met her boyfriend down by the corner to the stable. Said something or other and laid her head against his shoulder. I could see him wince as he stretched out his arm so she could kiss it better and, chuckling, she bent forward so her long dark hair concealed her face.

  1978

  “Come home with me. The rest of us would like to enjoy your company, too.”