Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) Read online

  As we sat there in the bar I asked Nat Newsom why he hadn’t intervened to stop the hustle. I asked him, too, why he let himself be shaken down like that. I recall Nat’s tiny thumbs on the tabletop as he sucked his beer through his straw. Then he leaned back and explained to me that if the world was like a person sometimes thought it was, then he wouldn’t have the courage to even open his eyes in the mornings. He also said that if it was a choice between losing ten dollars and losing confidence in the possibility of people being called Kevin and Charlie and being black and white at the same time, then he preferred to lose ten dollars.

  I never made use of Nat Newsom in my studies of genetically predisposed naïveté. He was too odd for that. But even though as research material he was unsuitable for my dissertation, Jack Soya’s Laws of Strategy, I will never forget him, not least because a short time later someone kicked him so hard in the head during an incident out at JFK that what little sense he had inside him could not be saved. I briefly considered adding him to the notes, but decided against it. A good scientist is known by his ability to select.

  HAIR SALON

  I LIVE IN A TWO-ROOM APARTMENT IN A BUILDING AWAY FROM THE center. It’s not long since I moved out here and I don’t know many people. I asked the hairstylist on the opposite corner how much he charged compared to the ones in the city:

  “Practically nothing,” he said, and asked me to lean my head back farther.

  For smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with the hairstylist I get my hair done for half price. Once in a while, the fat lady who lives in our building walks by on the street outside. She has permission to keep a dog in her apartment, because her dog can’t bark. I asked the hairstylist what kind of a dog can’t bark. He said it was because the fat lady gives the dog her medication. Apparently, she said it’s to be on the safe side. Which is fine by me. I don’t care one way or the other, and when the hairstylist asks me why I’m down in the dumps I talk about something else, or I say with a wry smile I don’t like to see in the mirror:

  “Oh, the usual stuff.”

  That makes him think it’s to do with men, and he can think what he wants. I can see the fat lady from my building tying up her dog outside the Laundromat across the street. We usually say hello, and I think it’s because she once helped me out in the Laundromat. I’ve often seen her on the bench in the park, sharing a beer with one of the locals. She’s always doing something, and now she goes inside the Laundromat as the hairstylist sprays my hair. He says I have split ends and wants to sell me silk oil from America, but I’m not buying any.

  “It’s all about loving yourself. If you don’t love yourself, who else will?” the hairstylist says.

  Someone, I think to myself, and gaze out at the fat lady’s dog. It’s sitting nicely outside the Laundromat. It’s turned to face the corner of the building, though not as if waiting for something to appear. It’s a nice dog. I’ve seen it often, of course, plodding along at its mom’s heel, but I never noticed what it actually looked like before.

  “I wonder if it knows it’s out of its skull,” I say to the hairstylist, and he tells me it’s a cairn terrier.

  “Well, it’s out of its skull, anyway,” I say.

  We talk about what she gives it. The hairstylist thinks it might be diet pills. I say pancakes and estrogen. We laugh, and then the hairstylist says they’ve raised their prices at the Laundromat. Now it costs twenty-three kroner for seven kilos, thirty-eight for more. He thinks it’s extortion, but I don’t care. I never have more than seven kilos of laundry and have reached the point where I never will, unless I start stealing things. I say that to the hairstylist and we laugh about it, though I don’t care to see myself laughing in the mirror. It looks like I have no teeth.

  It was at the Laundromat I met the fat lady the first time. She showed me how the soap dispenser worked and where the little cups were for the softener. She was doing laundry for someone else, she said, and didn’t think she’d seen me before in the neighborhood. I said I’d just moved here from the center and she nodded slightly.

  When I came to get my laundry out of the washing machine she was still there. I had some trouble with the spinner and she’s the type who wants to help. She took control of my laundry. She rolled the trolley with my laundry over to the spinner and put my underwear inside piece by piece. She asked what number I lived at, and it turned out she went to the residents’ bingo nights with someone who lived on the first floor. While she was telling me about all the things she had won over the years, I was thinking she must have been young in the seventies. She was probably a bit chubby, but pretty. She’d have worn white jeans with bell-bottoms. She’d have had blouses with puffed sleeves, and her hair would have been fair and turned with a curling iron. Good company, but at some point she decided it was better to love everyone than just someone, and after that she just got bigger.

  “All it needs is a quick spin,” she said, and I didn’t care that she’d had her hands in my underwear.

  “Thanks for the help,” I said. “Anytime,” she said.

  Now she thinks she knows me. If she’s out with the dog, she waves, and if she’s standing in one of the other lines at the supermarket, she’ll call out:

  “Hey, how are you doing?”

  “Fine!” I call back, and I don’t even know her name.

  Sometimes she’ll come up to me on the sidewalk and tell me something trivial. One day, for instance, she stopped me to say someone new had moved into the apartment above her and that the person in question was noisy. The neighbors on her left always had their windows open to the courtyard, so all their conversations echoed in her kitchen, and the ones on her right were always doing it, as she put it. Morning, noon, and night they were doing it, she said, then made moaning noises and funny faces to avoid having to say sex, and she must have had the dog with her that day. I don’t know why I never really looked at it before. Its coat is brown, though graying at the ends. It wears a red collar.

  “How about a smoke?” the hairstylist says, and I nod.

  He goes into the little kitchen out back to get a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray. He has put his things, scissors and oil, on the counter in front of me, and while he’s away the fat lady comes out of the Laundromat across the street. I’ve seen her a couple of times standing in the store picking out pastries with another fat lady. She waves to me. I stick my hand out from under the cape and wave back. I think the hairstylist may be right, that it’s some kind of terrier. I can see her talking to it as they go down the street together. Valium, I think to myself, and the sun beats down on the pavement.

  THE HERON

  I WON’T FEED BIRDS, BUT IF YOU MUST, THEN YOU SHOULD DO SO IN Frederiksberg Gardens. There are tame herons in Frederiksberg Gardens, and the park authorities have placed the park’s benches at some distance from one another so as not to attract too many birds to one area. There are problems at the end of the park where the alcoholics sit, particularly with ducks, but I never go that way, and you can see the herons everywhere. Of the heron itself, one can only say that from a distance it looks impressive, but this doesn’t apply when you get close up. It’s too thin, and tame herons in particular look malnourished. Most likely all that bread gives the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens bad stomachs and is to blame for their not making an effort to fly. Last winter I saw one slouching on the back of a bench with its long, scrawny neck. Its feet were completely white and it barely even reacted when I walked past. The way the wind ruffled its neck feathers made me want to go back and sit down next to it. It was the way the suffering had to be drawn out like that, the way herons never really muster the enthusiasm. But I won’t touch birds, alive or dead. They shouldn’t be played with, and you should take care never to touch other people with your infected hands. If a bird is dead make sure not to come into contact either with it or with its excrement. Disposable gloves must be used, and the bird should be picked up with a plastic bag, the way you pick up dog shit. The bag should be sealed and disposed
of with the household garbage or else buried. How difficult is that, with all the knowledge we have available?

  In order to avoid herons in large numbers, as well as the strange man who often stands on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion and feeds them herrings while claiming to be able to talk to them, I tend to walk instead around Damhus Pond. At Damhus Pond whatever a heron might have to say is meaningless. Besides, herons have difficulty colonizing Damhus Pond because of the nearby houses, the foot traffic, and all the cyclists. It’s easy to see from the detritus littering the water’s edge that the pond has been ruined by cyclists. There are many out-of-place objects there, and as well as bikes they once found a dismembered female body in a suitcase in the pond. An entire woman in little pieces put into freezer bags. The suitcase was found by someone out walking his dog. Or, presumably, it was the dog that found it. Credit where it’s due. There are always lots of dogs around Damhus Pond, and I can picture this particular dog very clearly as I walk along the path. It’s a golden retriever and it’s fussing in front of the suitcase, which has drifted halfway up onto the shore. The golden retriever has a secret urge to roll around in carcasses, preferably those of birds or mice, but how is it to tell the difference? I can picture it, and I can imagine its owner at the moment the realization kicks in. I imagine he remembers the moment the suitcase was opened whenever he is getting ready to take a trip, and likely even the dog was never the same again.

  Things are contagious. Things want to get in through the cracks. That’s the way they are, and I know from a former colleague of mine that the woman was killed and dismembered in an apartment in the Vesterbro district and that the girl who lived in the apartment downstairs and who was studying veterinary science moved out not long afterward, even though her upstairs neighbor had been apprehended and sentenced for the murder. Who could blame her? She probably kept thinking about all the times she had passed him on the stairs. Most likely she felt the building was contaminated and even the slightest sound reminded her of the night she heard something going on upstairs. But something is always going on in the night, there are always smells and sounds: pigeons rustling in the attic, creatures on the move, and the herons of Frederiksberg Gardens can sometimes be seen, looking like gray poultry shears in the sky over Valby. The heron is an awkward bird in flight, and the Heron Man on the path leading to the Chinese Pavilion would do well to tell the herons so, seeing as how he’s always babbling away at them like that.

  Although my apartment is on Frederiksberg Avenue I willingly walk the extra distance to Damhus Pond to escape the gathering of birds, and as for dismembered bodies I’ve walked around the pond most of my life without ever finding one myself. When I was a child, my friends and I would run around the pond because our physical-education teachers at Vigerslev Allé School told us to do so. I still see children who look like me and my best friend, the dentist’s son, Lorenz, running around the pond. Whenever a tall, skinny boy runs past me, I picture Lorenz racing to come in first. I tend to stop and smile when I see kids running around the pond like that. But after going around it myself I no longer want to stop and smile at anyone, certainly not the young women with their stony faces and big baby carriages. They always come in flocks, great flocks of mothers, and they stir up bad feelings in one another, so none of them will even look at you when you walk past.

  I step aside into the grass, thinking about the dog, the suitcase, the body, and how the veterinary student lost her swagger overnight, and how it doesn’t take a doctorate to have kids. I have known hopeless individuals to have children. It doesn’t require much more than a certain degree of sexual excitement, at least in the male, and at any rate it’s not the women with the baby carriages who are in charge of the biology of it. If anyone is in charge of the biology it’s God, but they probably made Him step aside, too. No one at the age of those mothers believes she needs eternal life, and even the concept of giving way to oncoming traffic seems unreasonable. But it’s important to me, and sometimes when those mothers have passed by I look back at them and wonder what it would be like if they swelled up. They’d begin to expand, and eventually they’d expand so much that they could no longer keep themselves together, and then I picture them exploding: shreds of flesh in the trees and along the shore, blood spattering on the swans, the ducks, and the coots floundering in the grass. There’s a rustling in the grass, the kind that makes dogs want to roll on the banks. I hear the rustle, and I hear the babies screaming in their carriages. I picture Lorenz skating through the mud, racing on around the pond on his pale, thin legs, long since dead, eaten up from within by sick-cell divisions, cremated and interred into the ground, while I keep walking, through the dead birds and the dead mothers, to get to the baby carriages. I have to be careful not to lose my balance, and then I reach my hand down into one of the baby carriages left behind, my hand with a cookie in it, and the child inside looks up at me with eyes full of astonishment. I pick it up. I lift it high into the air, and the movement causes its pacifier and its rattle to fall to the ground. I wish the child no harm; all I want is to lift it into the air before putting it back and walking home through Frederiksberg Gardens.

  The heron was there last winter. Sitting with its beard blowing in the wind and its long pale toes clutching the back of the bench. Incapable of fright, tired and sallow in its gaze, smelling of the mites that lived in its underfeathers, and I should have sat down next to it.

  KARATE CHOP

  SHE HAD ONCE BEEN ADVISED TO LISTEN CLOSELY TO WHAT A MAN said just when he began to sense a woman was showing interest in him. For unknown reasons, most men at that very moment give off important information about their true nature. This was what she had been told, and she had known men herself who, in the middle of an intimate conversation on a very different subject altogether, could say:

  “You should know I’m not an easy man to live with.”

  Or: “I can be such an asshole at times.”

  Mostly, she had considered this to be self-deprecation, if not a form of politeness, and if she did not take it seriously it was because she had not understood that a person could be in possession of disturbing knowledge about himself and still have no wish to change. For that reason, and because she lived for the idea that everything had some deeper reason, she never believed what these men said about themselves. It was hard for her to acknowledge that their words really were intended to be warnings and that her failure to listen would end up costing her dearly, but she went so far as to agree with them when afterward they said:

  “It wasn’t like you didn’t know or anything. I told you how I was.”

  And indeed they had, yet still the problem recurred with the next one, and the next one again, and every time the man sensed she was about to make herself vulnerable to him, he told her something disturbing about himself. Annelise would smile then and say:

  “Oh, stop it.”

  But they never did.

  When she met Carl Erik Juhl, what made her fall for him, in effect, was his long list of disturbing traits. Working with children with psychological problems and learning difficulties, she was used to meeting adults who were disinclined to acknowledge their own weaknesses, and in that respect Carl Erik’s frankness seemed redeeming. He had been called in for a meeting at the school about her sessions with his son, Kasper, who was in seventh grade, and almost at the very instant he stepped inside her office Carl Erik confessed that he had a temper, was something of a coward and a poor father to boot. Annelise pushed back her chair slightly so as to get a better look at him. And there he was. His face was round, his hair thin and curly. He looked out the window behind her, and his smile was so sweet her heart turned somersaults.

  What she wondered now was whom to blame for the wounds her relationship with Carl Erik Juhl had inflicted upon her. She turned her body in front of the mirror in the bedroom and lifted her right arm on which was a bruise. It was quite unacceptable of him, yet at the same time her not listening to what he told her was suspicious. Not o
ne of the traits he had ascribed to himself that day in her office had he failed to demonstrate in practice.

  She sat down at an angle on the edge of the bed and frowned. There had to be a reason, and one had first to look to oneself to discover what was wrong. Her upbringing had been decent enough, though one time when she was about ten and had fallen off her bike and ended up in the hospital, her father had not even come to visit. Not caring for the smell of hospitals, he had stayed home instead. It was by no means unlikely that some encoding of basic insignificance and a tendency to neglect one’s own needs had taken place then and left its mark. Or perhaps it was her relationship with her brother. Arne had been good at sports and wouldn’t bother playing with her unless she was able to take the ball from him at soccer. Their mother had always been so quiet, too, and yet to no avail, Annelise thought to herself and pulled the comforter up over her shoulders. Judging from the students she treated, not many children escaped a beating of one sort or another. But that didn’t necessarily turn them into thugs, masochists, and murderers. There had to be more basic psychological traits, perhaps even gender related, that could account for her behavior. Carl Erik’s too, for that matter. He was always falling short, and she could never make an issue big enough. It was no good.

  Annelise gazed down perplexed at her right hand, and as she did so she thought about how, when they had started going out together, Carl Erik liked when she was drunk. He wanted her with him out on the town and encouraged her to flirt.