Falling Sideways (34 page)
“Vhat kind of bird are you?” she asked, and touched his face.
He pressed his cheek against her cunt, arms doubled around her narrow hips, and began to murmur a silent prayer of thanksgiving.
Kampman pulled the Toyota into the garage and entered the house through the boot closet, limping slightly, his eyelids half-lowered with memory of sounds and words and sensations that would nourish him for three weeks to come. It was late. He would sleep in the basement guest room. But first he would allow himself a cognac from the XO he kept under lock in the living room. He would sit in the dark with it and contemplate the details of his evening. This was
his
time. No thought of Adam, no thought of
any
thing.
In the hallway, he thought he smelled cigarette smoke. Karen again, no doubt. But in the house? That would have to be mentioned in the morning. He knew she smoked, but she usually at least tried to hide it.
He crossed the living room in the dark, slipped out his key pouch to fit the key into the cabinet lock, lifted out the XO and a snifter. The smell of smoke was heavy here. Then a light clicked on behind him, and he spun toward it. Karen sat in her chair with a glass of wine, the floor lamp lit beside her, a cigarette smoldering between her lips.
“Who
are
you?” she asked.
He felt his head twitch. “I beg your pardon?”
“Who
are
you?”
“How much have you had to drink?”
“Who
are
you?”
For a moment he could think of no further response, fixed as he was in the sharpness of her gaze. Then his mouth opened and he said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Her face showed no sign of having heard. “Who
are
you?” she said again.
“Who am I? I’ll tell you who I am. I am the man who takes care of things. I am the man who gets up first in the morning and who is first into the office and last out in the evening and who takes care of things. There and here, too. That’s who I fucking well am.”
She twisted out her cigarette and rose, looked him up and down, laughed a single, mirthless note, and left him there.
It was not the fish. The fish had been three days ago, and she was still getting sick. Sporadically. In the bathroom, she dipped the stick of the litmus paper into the vial of urine. It turned green.
Lars was sitting at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee, picking his nose and leafing through the real estate pages of
Berlingske
. She watched him from the shadows of the shallow hall. Then he glanced up and his hand slipped beneath the edge of the table.
“Hey, honey, listen to this,” he said. “ ‘Istedgade. Handyman’s special. Two hundred square meters. One point five mil.’ ”
“
Istedgade!
Isn’t that all prostitutes and drug addicts?”
“Was. They’re on the way out. It’s getting to be prime real estate. Now is the time to buy. We could fix it up and sell it for at least twice that, maybe three times, in just a couple of years. Meanwhile we could rent it out.”
“Where would we get the money?”
“Borrow it. You know very well the interest rate is down practically under the inflation level. With the money we made off that, we could pay off the place in Gilleleje just like
that
.” He snapped his fingers. “And still have half a mil surplus.” She looked at his fingers. He looked into her eyes, and his own took on a deep, intense shade of blue, almost violet. His voice was hushed. “We could be rich, honey.”
Birgitte stepped through the doorway and sat across from him. “Lars,” she said, “I’m pregnant.”
She could see the smile begin to lighten his eyes before his face went still. She could see what he was thinking. She had already sorted this out. There was only one way to do this, only one thing to say. Everything now depended on it.
She smiled and shook her head. “He and I never got that far.”
Lars was still watching her.
Only one thing to do. Her smile broadened. She shook her head again. “Never. He and I never did it, Lars. It’s yours, honey.”
There was music at the North Bodega tonight. Three men wearing black peaked caps trimmed with shiny metal piping, the word
jazz
spelled out in metal on the crown, a trumpet player, guitarist, and bass man. The bass, a short, dark-haired man with a strong jaw, also sang. He was singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me.”
Adam sat by himself at the corner table, sipping a Hof, surprised that he was enjoying the music, the man’s moody, sad voice. He knew this song from somewhere and had never liked it, but he liked the way this man sang it.
Across the room, the man Adam had seen before with the bandage on his finger sat at the alcove table with that strange-looking long thin woman. The bandage was gone, and he was holding her hand and peering deeply, almost reverently, into her eyes. She returned his gaze. They were very still, almost like a painting.
The singer in the black peaked cap was making faces as he plucked the bass, now doing “Oh, Lady Be Good.”
I’m just a poor boy
Lost in the wood
.
Lady be good
To me.
Jes and Jytte had not shown up. Adam wondered whether they were together, wondered whether he cared. Jytte’s feelings for Jes seemed to fluctuate constantly between admiration and annoyance, while her feelings for him seemed more like she considered him a little brother, even if he was older than her. He realized the other evening, listening to her argue with Jes, that he didn’t love her anyway. He realized he didn’t know what love was. He didn’t know what anything was or meant, and somehow that realization was bracing to him. He felt as though he had walked into a brick wall of ignorance, slammed his face flat up against it, wiping out any thought he had ever had, or thought he had had, and now it would be necessary to rethink everything. Everything. He knew nothing, nothing at all, and the sudden awareness of that had the power of revelation. He was free.
Life now was like a blank picture, an empty box, and what he had to do now was slowly, carefully, to fill that emptiness. He would take on nothing without carefully examining it first. And the first thing he wanted to do was read a book. He had been forced to read so many books in school and had answered questions about them in class and on examinations and had received very high grades for his answers, but it was all fake. He understood nothing of it. Now he would take one book,
one
, and he would read it, scrutinize it, and he would not put it aside until he understood it. He would take nothing for granted, nothing at face value. All he had to do was select the book, and he had all the time in the world to do that, and he would take his time. It was exciting to think about. Out of all the books that had ever been written, he would now select one, and he would read it. He would look at every word from every angle he could imagine, and he would find understanding.
Or else he would create it.
The singer ended his song and said with his gravelly voice, “You have been listening to the Asger Rosenberg Trio, and now we will take a short and very intense pause before we come back singing again. And remember, as a very wise man once said, ‘A little beer is good for you.’ So by extrapolation, a lot of beer is a lot of good for you.”
The men laid aside their instruments and went to the bar, and Adam noticed then, around the turn of the wood, half-hidden against the wall, that man again. It was definitely the same man. He thought so. It could be. The man slid off his stool and began to gather his coins and cigarette pack and matches from the bar.
Adam decided. He swallowed the rest of his Hof, slipped on his jacket, and went to the door. The man zipped his jacket. Blood was pulsing in Adam’s ears. He took his time opening the door and paused outside, pretending to look at something he took out of his pocket, watching from the corner of his eye as the man approached the door. Then he started walking.
He turned right from Solitude Way onto North Bridge Street and heard footsteps continue behind him. A quick glance over his shoulder and Adam saw it was the man from the bar. He decided to keep going to the next corner and to cross, and if the man was still there, he would act. He slowed his pace to time his approach to the corner with the green light, crossed slowly. The man was close behind him now. On the opposite pavement, Adam spun toward him.
“Are you following me?”
The man jerked back and glared at him. Then he said, “What are you, fucking nuts?”
“You mean you’re
not
following me?”
“Get lost, you little asshole. What are you, a faggot?” He stepped around Adam and moved quickly away, and Adam started laughing.
The man spun back, muttered, “Idiot,” and crossed to the other side of the street fast.
Adam couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. He kept chuckling as he continued down North Bridge Street, turned right on Blågårds. He hoped Jes was home. He wanted badly to talk to him, to try to explain what was happening, how the one thing seemed to lead to the other.
Words appeared in his mind.
What you don’t know you only have to ask. Ask who? Someone, yourself.
So simple, yet it seemed to have the force of revelation.
On Blågårds Place, he spotted Jytte sitting on the low park wall, talking to someone—Jes. They were both drinking from bottles of Tuborg. There were others around them, too—the guys Jes had introduced him to at the North Bodega. Jes spotted Adam, too, and bowed to a plastic bag at his feet, lifted out a bottle, and chucked it to Adam, who barely caught it. Beer geysered out as he popped the cap, and Jes flourished his hand before him and said, “My friend: Allow me, plice, to offer you the woba golves of Jalâl. There is pain and there is suffering in the world, but we are all in the hands of God, who wears the woba golves of the eternity. All else is sport and play.”
Jytte was sniggering. Adam laughed a little, too, but there was something here he didn’t like. Jes kept going on and on.
Then, over Jes’s shoulder, Adam saw a man approaching from behind. He thought he recognized him. He thought it was Jalâl.
In the back of the shop, Jalâl washed his hands carefully, working the rough grains of scouring powder along the edges of his fingernails, into the creases of his knuckles and palms. Then, holding up his hands like a surgeon’s, he turned to Khadiya, who draped a clean white linen towel over them and rubbed them dry. It was their daily ritual, the way she helped Jalâl out of the world of commerce and back into the life of family and spirit. When she had dried his hands, she rolled down the long sleeves of his gray dishdasha for him and patted his cheek. He kissed her forehead.
“You have some old bread for me?” he asked, pulling on a sky blue padded ski jacket over his dishdasha and switching a wool pakol for his lightweight kufi cap. She handed him a plastic bag stuffed with leftover bread and pita of the past days.
“We eat at nine,” she said.
“My boy Zaid is coming today?”
“Tonight we dine alone again,” she said, and touched his cheek to comfort him. “He will be all right,” she said. “He needs only some more time.”
Jalâl smiled ruefully, nodded. He let himself out the front of the shop, stepping around the little wooden horse ride, which he dragged in each night and out again each morning when he opened at nine, even if no one ever rode it. Someday perhaps it would give pleasure to some small ones, his own grandchildren, perhaps.
He locked the front door with a key and, from the street, surveyed the front of the shop quickly. Time to wash the window. Dome of the Rock. It pleased him. It was a good enough business. It fed and sheltered them all. He knew he would never be a wealthy man, but he would never be a poor man, either. He earned enough for his family and a little extra for charity, too. And it pleased him to employ the son of an important man. A good boy, who listened to the things Jalâl had to say to him.
It could have been Zaid working for him, but that had been the source of their angry words, Jalâl’s assumption that the boy would help him in the shop. It was necessary for Jalâl to learn to understand that this would not be so, to listen to Khadiya’s counsel about this, unreasonable as it seemed to him.
He crossed ælled Way, heading toward North Bridge Street, plastic bag tucked beneath his arm, greeting the fellow merchants he passed on his way in the common Arabic they used on the street.
“Salaam aleikem.”
“Aleikem salaam.”
Jalâl belonged to no mosque. There must be no compulsion in religion, Muhammad had said, and no exaggeration. Jalâl constructed his own manner of observance. He read his Koran with care. He meditated the words, and he also read the thoughts of learned imams and considered them. It was a way to live in peace with other men. It was good.
On the corner of North Bridge, a young man sat cross-legged on the cold sidewalk with a small cardboard box in front of him. Printed on a paper propped against his knees were the words
Homeless & hungry.
The young man’s head was bowed.
Jalâl dropped two crowns into the box.
“Have a good day,” the young man said without looking up.
“God’s blessing,” said Jalâl. So many orphans now in Denmark. How did this happen in a land that had always made provision for the poor? But even the poor here were hardly poor in the material things. They were a well-fed people for whom hardship meant no playing toys for the children or no vacations on a sunny beach. He thought of his days in Kabul, after the Russians had come in and killed his father. Then there had been days of very little food, when a full loaf of bread was a luxury, a single egg a precious thing. These people had not known such hunger. Perhaps far in the past, but not this generation and not the one before that, either. Of course, they had the Germans here under the last great war. He understood that, as they would understand him. But the hunger here now was different. Jes, who worked for him, was skinny as a beggar, haunchless, but he did not want for food or any other thing he chose—education especially. Things were changing.