A Postcard for Annie Read online

  Copyright © Ida Jessen, 2013

  English language translation © Martin Aitken, 2022

  Published by agreement with Copenhagen Literary Agency ApS, Copenhagen

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

  Archipelago Books

  232 3rd Street #A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Penguin Random House

  www.penguinrandomhouse.com

  Ebook ISBN 9781953861238

  Cover art: Emil Nolde, Phantasie (DreiKöpfe), 1931–1935

  This work is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Funding for the publication of this book was provided by a grant from the Carl Lesnor Family Foundation. This publication was made possible with support from the Danish Arts Foundation, Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Excursion

  December is a Cruel Month

  An Argument

  A Postcard for Annie

  Mother and Son

  In My Hometown

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  An Excursion

  In her coat, standing at the counter, Tove wrote:

  “I’ve gone out.” She then crumpled the note in her hand and wrote instead: “Since you clearly weren’t interested in herring—” Here she ran out of words for a moment, before adding simply: “I am not your fucking housewife.” She read it back to herself. Was it clear enough? Yes, she believed it was. She looked at her watch. It was a quarter past six, the car would be coming up the drive any minute now. She took the packet of raw herring fillets from the fridge and placed it on top of her note. The telephone rang. She went into the living room to answer it, but on seeing that it was Max she didn’t, and left it to the answering machine. She heard the recording of her own tinny voice, and at the same moment her mobile started ringing in her bag.

  She hurried down to her bike in the shed. The back tire was flat. Pumping it, she thought about her note, and it occurred to her how superfluous it was. She would be gone. He would come home to an empty house. It would give him something to think about. She went back inside and threw it away. Some juice from the herring had already seeped into the paper. But she left the fillets where they were on the counter.

  As she came out again she noticed the neighbor on the other side of the hedge. He waved and came towards her purposefully in a way that suggested he had something to say. “Hello,” she chimed, waving back. And with that she was on her way.

  It was the third of April. The spring had been cold, four or five degrees Celsius most days, but now, cycling through the woods, she discovered it was too warm to be wearing gloves. She removed them and stuffed them into her pocket, then swiped off her knitted cap too. She’d been so busy these past months that she’d barely been out at all, and now it became apparent to her that nature had not been idle either. Among spruces and pines, wild apple trees were in bud, and the sour cherry trees were already blossoming. Somewhere among the trees a woodpecker drummed, and immediately another responded in the distance, a hollow-sounding echo, as if connected to the first via some subterranean channel. The anthills, which for months had appeared so dull and dead, now teemed with shining ants, and the air was fresh and redolent with the foresty smells of earth, wood, and moist rock.

  She imagined the big blue car coming along the coast road at any moment, turning off and passing the scout hut, gliding through the new residential area, slowing down as it reached the long front garden, then finally pulling up in the drive. He would get out, stand for a moment and gaze absently in the direction of the woods, walk up to the front door and find it locked. What would he do then? Well, presumably he would unlock it. Go inside. Without calling out he would put his jacket away meticulously on a hanger; he would bend down and untie his shoelaces, place his shoes on the shelf and put on the pair he wore at home. He would go to her workshop to see if she was there. Inside was the sofa she had almost wept with rage over that morning and which was now nearly finished; there were her storage shelves with their rolls of fabric, her desk with its scissors, tape measures and two sewing machines, and on the floor a tall yellow vase full of sprigs. Realizing that she wasn’t there, he would then go and see if she was in the living room or the kitchen. Without deliberation he would throw the herring fillets in the bin. Perhaps he would emit some expression of annoyance at the mess they’d left on the counter, before going back into the living room, taking the newspaper from his briefcase, sitting down, opening it, and then very quickly dozing off.

  No. He would call her first.

  As soon as the thought occurred to her, she stopped and dismounted, took out her phone and switched it off, realizing only then that she couldn’t remember her PIN – the SIM card was new and for the time being she’d noted the codes down on a sheet of paper in the kitchen drawer. The thought made her feel good in a rather bitter sort of way.

  She cycled past the little home bakery whose door had just been painted and the sign hung out. Its tiny front garden had been dug up ready for planting, as it was at this time every year. By the gate, pots of roses and sage stood waiting to be put in the soil so that everything would be ready when the summer-house owners soon began to appear on the weekends, ebbing and flowing for a couple of months until hopefully the summer kicked in properly; eager to fill in their time, they would come and buy the baker’s stodgy cinnamon rolls, which were edible only when still warm and would surely be impossible to sell under any other circumstance than that of the mild and doggedly unacknowledged tedium belonging to the summer visitor. Across the road was the photographer’s place. She too had put out her sign, though this one advertised pashmina shawls brought home from India. The rhus typhina in her front garden was still draped with Christmas lights and long festoons of dyed feathers that told of Easters long gone. They were never taken down. Last year’s flowerpots sprouted grass, while old tin cans with wire handles made receptacles for bird feed. At the moment, it wasn’t apparent at all how delightfully it would all come together in the month ahead, how the roses would engulf the garden path and almost hide the little studio from view, blocking out its light, the photographer herself sitting outside on hot summer days waiting for customers. Cycling on, she passed an old lady who was carefully weeding her bare soil, and then a farmhouse where she noticed that the old wooden sign with the homemade lettering had now been replaced by a shiny new one made of glass: Farm Shop.

  Even in the crippling economic crisis, optimism prevailed, or perhaps more accurately stubborness, indomitableness. She knew most of the people who tried to earn a living here along the gravel road and all seemed to be making the best of a bad situation, adapting to meet the demands of potential customers blind to the underlying financial precarity such endeavors involved. There was a certain freedom in running one’s own business, of course, but it was a freedom that tied the baker to the baker’s oven and the photographer to her light-starved studio, just as it tied Tove to her workshop. On any other day, if she’d had the time, she might have stopped at either one, or visited Kristian’s farm. They were her
friends, in the same boat. But today she was too restless.

  * * *

  Tove had set herself up selling curtain materials, but had gradually moved into buying up old furniture she reupholstered before selling on. While still new to the business she had written to a women’s magazine asking if they might be interested in doing a piece about her and they had agreed, running a feature over several pages about a woman who had found happiness in a small coastal town by never losing faith in herself and relentlessly pursuing her vision. By being herself. During the interview she had talked at great length and felt rather satisfied, but reading the article through she could only cringe at the way she so confidently went on about her life with the kind of intimacy that in print made her feel positively sick.

  Publicity-wise it had done no harm. There were photos of her workshop, her cat in the window, the three café tables in the conservatory. She couldn’t help feeling it was cheap of her, calculated. But customers began to come from all over the country. She sat in her workshop upholstering ottomans, sewing curtains and blinds. She kept the place clean and baked cookies she would offer to her customers. She spoke endlessly on the phone with people wanting to know in the minutest detail what she had on sale in the shop so they could weigh up if it was worth the long drive from Hjørring or Sønderborg or Lol-land-Falster. She got her own website. She spent whole evenings staying open for carloads of women who, after handling everything on display, eating her cookies, and drinking her tea and coffee, would end up buying two bars of soap and a scrap of material for 15 kroner.

  She reupholstered chairs and settees that were too much of a job for her on her own, and because of the time spent twisting her back into the most awkward positions, and the strength it required to stretch the fabric tight, she often felt as if she’d been beaten up. The fire retardants in the fabrics made her hands dry, and sores appeared in the corners of her mouth that would not heal. She considered installing a ventilation system, but did nothing about it. She stopped eating properly and would simply stand at the stove picking a mouthful of something out of a saucepan with a fork, eating on the go, leaving the things in the sink where they would stay until she found time one day to do something about them.

  But then there were the antique fairs.

  Usually she would go with Larna who had an antique shop in Bogense. The excitement when they paid their thirty kroner admission. The way they could scan the room and instantly know what they wanted. They approached it systematically, agreeing a ceiling for how much they would spend, then splitting up, later to join up again, dizzy with their love of beautiful objects and the notion that what they had purchased was quite unique. And at bargain price too.

  Both were divorced. Tove had no children, Larna had two, grown-up and out of the house. Larna always had boyfriends, but kept them to herself, for which reason Tove was unable to keep track of them. They passed into Larna’s life and then out again, one after another, without it seeming to affect her that much. Tove, however, would tend towards unhappiness if she even came close to a man. “Oh, I cry too,” Larna had once said when Tove asked how she could be so resilient. “But it’s such a waste of energy, I prefer to move on.”

  One spring they went to the big antique fair in Odense. Larna was on the lookout for mirrors and porcelain, Tove for furniture classics from the Sixties, without cushions, for they were cheap at the time and she had become friends with a saddler who in exchange for her sewing would make cushions and bolsters for her. But instead she lingered at a stand, examining a yellow floor vase displayed on a writing desk. It was the color that had prompted her to stop. Ever since she was a little girl she had hovered over that same color with a love so powerful it felt like a vice, and so very private to her. Even now, in the home she had made as an adult, she possessed very little that was yellow, as if she were afraid of overdosing, just as she would only rarely go to her doctor, fearing herself at bottom to be a hypochondriac. She had mentioned this to Larna one time, only for Larna to laugh and say, “Oh, I’ve always got cancer somewhere too. Where’s your brain tumor? Mine’s here,” and she jabbed a finger at her temple.

  She had no name for this particular yellow. It wasn’t clear, but it wasn’t cloudy either. A spindly brown pattern ran down the length of the vase, and nestled in one of its contours were three deep blue spots that reminded her of oversized bilberries. It almost had her mouth watering.

  There was no one manning the stand. She stepped forward and found a price tag: 7,000 kroner.

  Too expensive. Anyway, what would she do with it? She’d never be able to sell it on with any kind of profit. Besides, she had no intentions of beginning to deal in ceramics. But she could at least bring Larna over so that she could look at it too. She rummaged in her bag to find her phone.

  “That’s a good buy,” a voice said, almost into her ear.

  She spun round. Directly behind her stood a man. He stepped back slightly and smiled at her. A quick scan and she saw everything: beautiful shoes, canvas coat, nice mouth and a confident gaze. She dropped her phone back into her bag.

  “If you want it, I’d be willing to help,” he said. Her mind raced. She had finished a sofa the day before. It hadn’t been picked up yet, but she was owed three thousand there, and then there was the refund she’d received for overpaid tax, which she hadn’t touched yet.

  “How much are you willing to pay?” he asked.

  “It’s too expensive,” she said.

  “Do you know this particular vase?”

  “No, I know nothing about it,” she said, and he laughed.

  “You see the lines there?” he said. “They were applied with a cow’s horn. It was a technique in use at the beginning of the last century. The uranium yellow is typical of the period too.”

  Uranium yellow.

  “It’s heavy, but if I pick it up you’ll see the signature on the bottom. There’s not a mark on it, not a single chip.”

  A suspicion formed in her mind. “Are you the seller?”

  He shook his head with a smile.

  “Then you’ve had your eye on it.”

  Still the smile.

  “But don’t you want it yourself?”

  “No, it’s yours.”

  It was staggering. In less than a finger snap a person could be hurtling towards something they’d never have envisaged a year, a month, a week, an hour, even a minute before. She stood for a moment, allowing his gaze to consume her, glancing down once or twice at the floor, and each time she looked up again his vivacious eyes were still fixed on her, as if what he wanted wasn’t a private matter at all.

  At last the seller appeared, wiping his mouth and excusing himself for having been at lunch, before launching into an energetic sales pitch, primed to parry any counter, but the man in the canvas coat stopped him. “What’s your best price?” he asked.

  “Five thousand,” the seller replied with a wink.

  “Done,” said the man.

  Tove felt obliged to step to one side. Her cash was in a homesewn money belt around her waist. It was all undeclared. She went behind a screen and pulled some notes out, returning then to the two men who had already put the vase into a box and were busy packing it with wood shavings and newspaper. She paid the money and the man in the canvas coat offered to carry the box to her car.

  “Amateurs of his kind are always a pleasure to do business with,” he said on their way out. “He really hadn’t a clue what he had on his hands. It was the only thing he had that was worth looking at. You weren’t thinking of reselling, were you?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” Again, the feeling of being approved that rippled through her so unexpectedly. “Where are you parked?”

  She pulled the sliding door open and he placed the box in between some rolls of material she hadn’t taken in that morning. Then he reached his fingers into his wallet.

  “Here,” he s
aid. “My card, if you should come across anything else you’re unsure about in the way of faience or ceramics.”

  “I’ll give you mine, too,” she said.

  He studied it for a second. “Thanks,” he said.

  And that was that. He turned and went away across the car park. Gone, just like that. She couldn’t believe it. A moment ago she’d felt like the sexiest woman alive, the most desired, loved even. And now: gone.

  * * *

  —

  “He’s crazy about you,” Larna said.

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re beautiful, you’re intelligent, you radiate. Of course he’s crazy about you.”

  “Then why did he just go like that?”

  “It’s a strategy. He doesn’t want you to feel sure of yourself.”

  “It doesn’t work like that with me. I’d rather be chased.”

  “You will be. Wait and see.”

  For once, Tove didn’t trust Larna at all. She didn’t feel like talking about it anymore, and yet she couldn’t let go of it either. She told Larna about the vase being decorated using the tip of a cow’s horn, and together they imagined a bright factory hall full of skilled women all wearing bonnets to keep their hair out of the way of their delicate work, each seated with an arm outstretched, in their hand a cow’s horn, its tip directed towards vases, cream jugs, bowls, dishes, and plates.

  Only two days later, when she came home late in the afternoon, a rental van was parked in front of her house with an armchair in the back. Somehow she knew straight away who it was. He got up from the bench when she came round the side of the woodshed. A hand in his jacket pocket. The beautiful shoes. Him. She felt a dart of joy, strong and overwhelming. He’d come.

  She asked if he’d been waiting long, and he said no. Later it turned out he’d been hanging around in her garden for nearly two hours.