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ELVIRA
MADIGAN
1
There is summer
enough,
warm stalks, insects,
sun-buttered leaves
enough
to show love’s brevity,
Elvira
with the golden hair
and her count
Lieutenant Sparre,
deserter,
wholly in love and
profound as children
lost to everything but their play.
2
A girl-child from
the hotel
sees them.
Gap-toothed, squinting,
in the sun sees them
in the yellow grass.
Though what can she see
when he and the lady lie down?
They lie so long.
3
Together,
detained in stillness. Two
bodies.
The drone of insects around them.
Two.
The things from their bags
scattered
round them.
Lying.
4
AIEE!’
He jerks up, sprints away, yells,
shirt-sleeves whipping at elbow.
One hand beats his
rear.
‘Sixten, what … ?’
‘A bee stung my backside!’
The young man limps back:
long face of the noble
reproaching itself for nothing,
a face often solemn, unimpressed,
and as often betrayed
by a boyish trick of the mouth
that splits the mask with a grin
as now
of uncertain pleasure.
‘I shall never sit down again.’
Groans into her arms.
They snort, pampering each other,
hot on waking,
some gaudy insects of summer
at the brook of their sweat
lipping, a few.
5
To strangers, and
there have been many
in Denmark, spectators,
Elvira is
untouchable and
too pleased with her beauty.
But with him, self-unaware
as if her elegance too was
untrained, unassured,
her girl’s dream of repose
unsatisfied until
Sixten’s passion
made any world she had wanted
hers, obtainable, obtained.
Mistress of listening motion,
she finds, with her deserter,
her hidden warmth and stiff poise
fusing, fulfilled.
The ridiculous things that they do
are laughingly successful.
Their sensual love-making, too.
Her generous body is
shiveringly altered.
6
Stubs
of cotton
spring where the cut-throat razor
saws into his tunic.
Button.
Button
again.
And the braid.
Take off the braid.
A thoughtful operation.
A young man throwing a layer away.
He turns to the girl, his woman.
They
kiss the sun-smelling body;
touch lips
and,
having communed
with sun-odours,
how
can they not
sniff the dizzier oils
exuded by skin?
7
ON PARADE
IN THE
CHRISTIANSTAD COURTYARD,
SWEDEN: THE HORSE-GUARD ELITE
ON ROLL-CALL.
LIEUTENANT SPARRE MISSING.
8
The last button
gone.
He sniffs: what a game! wryly.
They kiss, lips sticky with sleep,
their tongues lowered
to the liquid tables,
their murmurs like gnats interchanging,
their murmurs like the dry moan of bees,
their blood absconding from pain,
their mouths shaped, aching
to measure the edge of desire,
to swallow red sacrament’s tongue,
the poison of sense,
their hearts palpitating
to hold to no feeling but this,
to satisfy summer,
summer’s taut wilderness cry.
9
To
resume, to be normal.
Soap mixed in an army mess-can:
Sixten half shaves off his beard.
The lather and half the hair
has gone from one side.
She is troubled.
‘Are you happy, Elvira?’
No reply
from her puck lips,
from her sleepless short-sighted eyes.
‘Are you happy?’
She nods.
He studies her slowly,
half his face bearded in lather,
the other half clean:
an insatiable seeing
that impales, draws her into his mind,
as if for the first time,
with
intelligent hunger;
that finds in her eyes intimate answers
to questions that do not exist,
answers that baffle and brace him
to
questions they have not heard.
He sees in her eyes how much she complies,
in each pupil
two worlds disappearing,
her future
and his,
the sky of each iris containing
the insistence of now.
Half his face bearded in foam,
his lips pet hers,
their eyes lock,
their lives enter the hole
of a pinprick.
She sinks down,
her dress, belle époque,
surrounding her with a surface.
He wades, he inclines
till his body covers;
and they kiss,
half his face bearded,
the soap creaming her face also,
their lips slipping,
arms outspread, fingers engaged:
he covers her with his body.
The razor drops to the grass.
10
Space happens to
her,
a vaulting of soul.
To a girl who was born
in a circus, sensitive and
greedy for life, out of place
in the raffish camps,
this summer outpours her
though it lead to her death
and
she knows it.
Always she has been graceful
though with no net underneath;
always proud, this Hedvig Jensen,
though the
caravans smothered;
always unnatural as ‘Elvira’,
eating, messing in with
mechanics, lion-tamers;
always out of reach,
she
longed
for a classic repose;
aware
how common her lovers,
agents, managers,
performers.
Always the obedient daughter
in her stepfather Madigan’s circus.
One thing no man could deliver
was the passionate Hedvig to herself.
She had loved her own body,
though never, until now
had she felt it transformed
as within this day
of
the sun-yellowed leaves.
11
They walk, fresh,
young.
He has kept his moustache
and looks almost democratic.
She on his arm
her hair a swept yellow swirl.
Belle
époque.
Through the grass
they rove like a moment unwinding.
Foot
lifting, rope-walker,
she hangs upon him,
surrendering into his side,
warm, both,
erect, centralised.
12
A
scarecrow,
ducked down in its rags.
Old coat.
Thistles up to its waist
in a dead-end of field
Sixten presses his fingers
to the scarecrow’s buttons,
assured
the world owes him this.
He snaps them away.
Civilian bone.
Sun-withered string
like dried pith
motes into dust.
Buttons in his palm.
‘Now we don’t have to buy them.’
And to repair the field-scare
he ties round its chest
the gold of his military braid.
The scarecrow stands to attention.
Has its hat adjusted.
13
To a hotel
in the corner of a lawn
in the forest’s depth
where a few trees ripple open.
‘Can we afford it?’
He has the impassive look
of an explorer
deciding a prospect.
The sunlight hums on the lawn.
At least they will start here.
In the lobby, among dark
panels,
a correct, craggy registrar
watches her write in his book:
‘Hedvig Knutsson’
beneath where he signed.
14
In their room they
affirm their arrival:
open a window,
open a valise, a wardrobe,
make their mark on the place.
He spills a purse onto the quilt:
how much time can they buy?
She does not notice,
but takes out a cardboard tube
and from that a sketch.
Shows him:
‘Done
of me in Paris.’
flock
of hair
eyes their own, avid,
lips greedy
But Sixten pauses;
he stares at a plant on a stand
severely, and pulls her, amused:
‘We
can’t have that here!
Under the bed, eh?’
Plant; stand. Heave
them apart.
They fall to, honking with laughter.
Wedge it. Won’t
go. Lift the bed.
Get it under, the plant on its side,
and the stand—
brushing the earth-crumbs after.
15
So they make this
their home
and spend their time
in the high grass, she
in her white bustled dress,
he in neckless shirt
fluttering after
butterflies.
Sprinting, twisting ankles,
his wide arms extend
behind
a quick white
chalky insect feinting
on awkward wings.
The field their arena,
they lope lightly
with momentous intent as if
this were the only game
they must see through,
with their backs to the world,
to evil and honour, for to be
like a ruthless child is to leap
back to the orchard, love’s garden.
16
Cook
shells peas out of doors,
her fat face peeled
by
the northern sun.
She sits with the gap-toothed child,
the sun sunk into her comfortable fat.
Says:
‘Such an excellent pair.
Have
you seen them?’
‘I think so. In
the woods.
But the man had
a beard,
gold
buttons.’
17
She tenses a rope
high between trees.
Her stockinged feet tread it,
her white dress crescented
above the knee.
A parasol steadies her in the green air,
slant sun,
five feet above ground.
The rope sinks
but she does not step
one foot
out of line.
She stands above him
an ingenuous spirit
while he picks at a root;
and if the root
grips as a lover
the bones of the dead,
or if the root
lies slack in soil
like a spent lover’s hand,
Sixten cannot determine:
he cannot think
of
anything that roots do.
Her parasol
like a stately hat
detached
among
leaves
goes by.
The rope
does not
swing
one inch
as
she foots it
to the next
rise.
Sixten discards a bark-sleeve,
looks off at the field
and does not let one movement
escape his mind—
not
even the skip of gnats in the air,
the crazed buzz about her sweetness.
18
One morning she
rises,
the earliest guest,
while Sixten sleeps.
She strolls on the skirting gravel,
her heart capricious, up early,
to the sunned side
where Cook is knitting.
‘Do you have a thread?’
She wants it for the buttons she will sew
to make Sixten’s coat a civilian’s.
Cook: plain peasant smile,
shy of her fat, nice:
‘Just
black, I am sorry.’
‘What are you knitting?’
Cook shrugs. Smiles
plainly.
Elvira has a pair of her needles,
a
spare loop of wool.
‘Show me how.’
‘Well, like …’
‘This?’
‘Yaw
… yaw …,’ Cook
nods,
approving, animated.
Elvira attempts it twice.
‘Aw …’ Cook
chuckles as she fails.
But Elvira keeps the wool.
She will not give up.
19
Afternoon.
Elvira and her count
picnic among the trees.
Part of the forest is theirs,
or
part of them
belongs for ever to it: flight into idyll
and a time to be
among the sun-yellowed leaves
and the mourn of insects
and the sexual daze
that transmutes for them
their ways of seeing.
Love makes them unblind.
All
of the world in their minds.
All time is now.
They can knit the beautiful
from what is. They
can give it a value.
20
Fruit, cheese,
bread,
stray twigs, leaf-crumbs on cloth,
Elvira with the wine.
He skims through a newspaper,
the world of the black and white.
Stops, fixes.
Jaw sags, then chews slowly on.
He reads to her:
‘The parents of Elvira Madigan
are acutely distressed
by her disappearance.
This beautiful young girl
is known all over Denmark
for her high-wire performance
in the Madigan circus.
‘She has left her
home.
The circumstances
are hard to ascertain.’
Elvira kneels,
hair by his hair
as he reads.
‘When she walked the wire
so lightly did she step
that everyone could see
her genius in moving.
‘The crowds would warmly will her
to walk with high lightness
as if upon nothing, yet
their warmth could never touch
that poise of hers,
which
was like a vision.’
She snorts into his ear.
He reads on:
‘Nothing could melt
her cold serenity…’
They
collapse, enlaced.
Roll sniggering
at the absurd report.
21
She giggles and he
fools
with her ‘cold’ heart,
roughing
the leaf-mould—
ah!
he tickles, she skews,
knocks the wine bottle over:
the red gush spoils the napkin,
glugs out a pool,
bloody under the cheese-knife.
22
An old, starched,
military gentleman,
his lady upon his arm,
halts,
coming upon
the scarecrow.
His grainy hands
unwind the dishevelled braid.
‘Is nothing sacred?’
He rewinds the gold cord, religious,
secures it in his pocket,
steps one pace to the rear.
Turns. Leaves the
field.
23
Elvira challenges
Sixten
as they return one evening by marsh mounds
and its willow stumps.
under clouds grey as shrapnel.
‘What do you know of war?’
she
taunts, seriously.
‘You haven’t fought.
It is more than parades.
Strutting is too easy.
‘I was two.
We were tenting in Paris
during the Prussian siege.
Families died every day.
I can remember the smell
of the burning horse-flesh.’
24
By the hotel child
who plays
with the buttons she has found
the retired gentleman
stoops stiffly.
He takes a button from the evening grass.
‘Where did you get these, my child?’
Factually:
‘Down in the woods.’
He peers.
‘The Seventh Horse.
Something
is wrong here.’
25
Next morning in the
sunshine
Cook cuts fish
on a newspaper that catches the bloody scales.
She slits off the skate’s head,
smears
it aside.
Under the bloody newsprint:
lifelike etchings
of Sixten, Elvira.
Cook does not notice.
It is life that intrigues her:
Elvira again up early,
an entrancement
in the orchard,
stealing a clothes-line,
not looking round,
a child whose secrecy
is all her misdemeanour will hide in.
She trails the rope through the seed-grass
to the woodside again.
26
‘Aw…’
The cook’s Danish brogue
cannot
believe
what she thinks this means.
She follows, out of breath.
She watches
from
a hedge of wet brambles.
Elvira hooks the rope at stretch height
around an oak
and drags the free end
round another tree.
Lifts her hem,
slips off her shoes,
strains up to a branch-hold,
wheedles herself up slowly
until she gets to a standing.
One foot tastes
a step on
the line.
And
the element is hers.
What she is made for,
air.
The thing her body’s wit
has taken for mate.
Her
partner is air.
It investigates her.
She breathes in.
It burns in her to the groin.
She leans on the air to make
balletic shapes
and new algebras of change.
She was made for this
slow motion.
Treading on air in the dewy sun.
She practises
alone in spots of leaf-shadow,
not for exercise.
The skill she has
is cast wherever.
The heads
of oak, of circus reporters,
either do not understand
or do not remember.
She has a skill.
Like love, it must be practised.
Walking on air,
creating steps that defy Nothingness,
quasi-eternal, a unique
deep life
which her pagan mind
treats as a prolonged
neglectful escapade.
For
her vocation came
as by accident
and stayed in her like a death’s-head in sleep.
A destiny. A life made over.
No one can go her way.
She makes her move.
She knows she is beautiful.
Two burdens to bear.
Her genius. Her
self-regard.
27
Cook cannot…
‘Aw…’
What has she seen?
High wire. Natural
breeding.
‘That one walks good
on the ground as well!’
She shambles back
through seed-grass;
short-legs it, tight of wind, disbelieving
to
her kitchen from which she gapes
at the glade.
She finds, bible-thick, a year-book,
plops the pages in inch-wads over
and turns on tiptoe.
Pleased as apple-pie,
she has found the entry.
That’s
who she is!
She knows.
28
Cook shifts herself
quickly
down
the stairs.
Under the apple-trees
accosts Elvira returning.
‘Miss! Miss!
Won’t they be proud
to hear Elvira Madigan
is staying with us!
In our trees as well!’
Elvira’s eyes shy sideways,
flinch back, startled.
‘No, they must not!
Nobody must know!’
Cook’s fat face stares.
She nods, understands.
She will protect them.
29
He reclines in the
grass,
his head in her lap.
‘You ask me if I am happy.
I’ve asked myself if I’ve a right
to be happy.
Perhaps we are living a life
that people can’t live yet.
The time will come when we can choose
more than one life,
when a man can admit that he changes.’1
30
They
stay on in the hotel.
Outside one edge of their wood,
a bridle path
on which they stray
and pick berries—
they
waste half,
drop them uneaten.
‘What would we do if this wood
were ours?’
with mock melancholy
he
asks.
‘It is ours. We
are here.’
‘I mean, if we belonged to it.’
‘I do not want to belong
anywhere.
We will choose when to leave.’
‘I’d like a house here,
I’d like the earth to own me.’
‘Would you, Sixten?’
He holds her fiercely:
‘I have what I want!
Are you afraid?’
She is aroused.
31
Cook shambles out,
dumping each foot
through the tricky ferns,
shoeing off branches.
‘Miss! Men are
here
asking questions.
You must go.
I’ve packed your bags.
In the stable!’
32
Red on sulphur sky.
Early morning,
an embryo bleeding its yolk.
Cook tracks with baskets for them.
33
Past the hotel
kitchens.
The wall-ivy twitches
like a tapestry of green bats
away from the sun side.
They creep on the gravel.
Freeze into a doorway.
A
portly man in a white suit
surveys the rear path,
idles
past
where they hide.
He goes on.
They hurry,
take
a hill path,
carrying their cases
under
a sky dull with rain-cloud.
34
A lake journey,
The boat stolen.
Water. Wide.
Peaceful.
They linger on it,
the mist rising, a
vapour.
He rows, correct, upright,
his long face concentrating,
on where to go next
not enchanted by a hairy-throat warble
among
in the reeds,
dispossessed,
slow at paddle,
slow to go on.
35
Fishing, they try
with pin and string paid out,
not skilled in the art.
A bite!
Food … fish …
She stands up like a bride,
hair golden.
A silver warp in the air
flops against her.
She drops back,
the fish in her lap.
But the boat tips too far.
Sixten,
ungainly, collapses,
tears through the early surface,
wallows in the water.
Gasps.
Her silly shrieks.
He choking,
laughing for her sake.
‘Come!’ she yells hoarsely.
He swims back.
And the boat tips again
as she hauls him half in
and he gulps out his laughs still,
or he tries to.
She is used to him now.
36
On the shore slope
amongst the bird-bone dry branch and fern
leans a cavalry man,
head cocked,
braided coat open,
watching.
The lovers are thrashing still,
trapping the fish on the planks.
It is slimy in her hands.
It spasms as
she squeezes her fingers around it,
holding the pouting mouth up.
Sixten stares.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes!’
It shoots
into the bristled lake-water.
37
He wades the boat
in.
From the stern she has sighted
the posted man in the trees:
moveless
as a gallows.
She is rooted in place
like a dry tongue on its roof.
An apparition!
Sixten lifts her ashore.
The boat wallows back.
It goes
where the slow breeze insistently takes it.
Sixten shivers, straightens his shoulders,
sees the soldier in the trees
through the branches
on the wood-slope.
He wades towards him.
The man takes off his
tunic,
drops it around his friend’s back.
38
‘How are the
children?’ asks Sixten.
He props his foot on a log.
They lean on the decayed ramp
of a silver birch keeled from the soil.
‘They are well.
Christian had whooping cough.
He misses you.
Louise lost a tooth.
She can spit through the hole
with her mouth shut.’
Sixten laughs drily.
‘She envied Christian that one.
Where
are you staying?’
‘At the Fishers’ Rest.’
Pause.
‘I remembered you said your father
came here to escape.’
‘I must change.
—And then we must eat!
You will join us, Karl.’
‘But why have you done this?’
39
‘I have gone over
to the women.’
Two friends against a birch-tree.
‘Have you thought about killing?
Sixten asks, angry. ‘With
bayonets?
Have you thought of that?
With time moving slowly
until you see the point sticking in.
First the outer skin,
the ridges, the epidermis,
then the blade going through
the subcutaneous fat,
to the organs, intestines,
that cannot find appetite for it.
Every time it is like that.
Love makes one see slowly.
I do not like bayonets.
I
have lain in the grass.’
‘I too have lain there, Sixten.
It is pleasant. But
it isn’t all.’
‘I have never loved the world, Karl,
as I love it now.
I have never had eyes
that became other eyes.
And I had children!
How could I,
who never saw life for certain,
give flesh and blood to the world,
and have nerve to kill it?
I could not see then.’
‘Do you see now?’
‘I have found the woman in me.
Let us go in and eat.’
40
On
a terrace overlooking an inlet
they take their meal.
Old wooden rail,
old waiter, deferential,
a different hotel, still expensive.
The grilled fish to their liking?
And the wine?
The evening
is not yet chilly, is long closing
as they chink glasses and chatter
about
the army, how to wheel a horse,
about
the circus, how to trust yourself ,
about
the new morality, newspapers,
daguerreotypes, butterflies.
Sixten
calls for the bill.
From
her shoe, Elvira
pulls a banknote,
passes it
beneath the table.
41
Karl and Elvira next
day
talk by early light of bare windows
of a breakfast room.
A
dawn pearls
her proud face,
half of it shadow.
‘I
saw you pass him the money.
You cannot afford this.’
‘For
some things the cost does not matter.’
Dawn burns cold edges
round her.
There is no reflection
in the window with day outside.
She is shadow, half-ghost,
no image in the glass.
Half what she is
goes through glass, leaving.
‘You
know he has children?’
‘I
never saw them.’
‘You
have done this to other men.’
‘Sixten
is not the first.
But he is the last.’
The
last sacrifice that her genius
and the age demand.
42
In the bedroom
Sixten
counts kroner.
They have left to them
a banknote, two coins … .
43
He visits a
pawnbroker’s
in the old quarter
where after the drizzle
the cobbles
are mercury between walls.
A
jewelled tie-pin.
It
rolls on the counter.
‘Five?’
He does not bargain.
44
And tonight they
drink.
The
first frost has not
yet
salted the dark.
Three celebrants.
Her yellow hair simple,
her laugh low and girlish.
Sixten gentle.
Karl for a while
is all they could want him.
The heat of wine
like a drug buys them time.
A hollow night full of jokes.
It sweats through to cool dawn
which is flat on the gulf.
Then, in the sag belly of speech,
Karl says, less than gallant:
‘Sixten, your wife
tried to drown herself.’
Elvira, head dumb with fatigue,
unable to measure the case,
drags away.
45
Sixten seizes his
friend,
almost faint with fury—
forces him to the terrace end
against rhododendrons.
‘Did you have to say that
in front of her?
You are not my friend!’
Like a boy,
obscurely ashamed
that truth will not heal
holes in the fabric of
friendship.
He shakes Karl.
‘You are not my friend
if you do not respect her!’
46
She …
has disappeared.
Sixten runs. Stomach
jolts.
Heartburn, dry mouth,
a muddied head, bitter thoughts.
Along a grey sand-track
winding
through forest roots
in and out of sight
of the water they rowed on,
along the edges of corn,
down
a steep bridle path
to a farmhouse they had once explored,
to a barn they had known.
He climbs to the hayloft.
She
is there.
47
But turns,
head tunnelling in straw:
‘Don’t come …’
‘He lied about my …’
He
pulls her.
They bury themselves in straw.
He inside her,
hands holding head,
heads biting shoulder.
48
She
carries to a pawnbroker
the sketch she has kept,
outline of her face
by a dwarf in Paris
signed TL.
‘It’s
not coloured.
… Two kroner?’
49
Joins Sixten on the
bridle path.
In her basket
there is food from the money.
Raspberries!
‘And I have money left.’
A billy of cream.
They suck the fruit,
fingers running to the wrist
with cream like a foam.
50
He must find work.
Strolls to the shore.
Comes to a woodcutter
at a smouldering pile
of rags by the water
who
does not look up
from the smoke.
‘Have you work?’
asks the man not used
to asking.
The woodcutter stays solid.
‘This is not for you.’
Sixten on a white shore,
the grey smoke rising.
51
A carnival in town:
barnstorming circus, a one-night stand.
Here a tramp drunk,
crafts matching each other,
hot pies and beer,
all the town getting out
and out of itself.
The crowd is abroad in its new hat.
Children play tag.
Oom-pah, happy trumpet sneer.
Banners and booze.
And a notice:
ARTISTES WANTED
52
They have opted for
Fate.
Fate chooses.
Elvira contributes her share.
It is
not so hard
to take what cards come,
she is easy with that.
She visits the circus director
and his pal in their room:
two men with clean shaves,
in shirt-sleeves, adjusting curtains.
‘We don’t need high-wire performers.
Hang on. Do you
dance?
Let’s see your legs. Hm.
Higher?’
She shows them an ankle. And
slightly higher.
Their satisfaction curls
like schnapps on the tongue.
‘You will do.
Twenty kroner this evening.’
53
Sixten does not
attend,
he is not invited.
Like a private on guard duty
he stamps outside, collar up
to hide his offended ears.
The music whips and scars
the still reflections
of dance-tent lights on the angry rhododendrons.
A bush is all his mind is:
a bush not able to move.
Iced light
lathed off the leaves
as from a bright blade
torturing his fury.
The music,
bright off the leaves,
investigates extremely
his unbearable mind.
In side-gasps he thinks of pain
as a squalid sentence, deserved.
He
must suffer for his decisions,
must drink heartburn.
What right
has he
to dignified pain?
The fiddles file at his nerves,
stop,
then they file again.
The leaves crawl up the house
like fingers over his face,
and she is in there dancing.
54
A slob, beer-brave,
eyes throbbing like pier lights,
slews out through a french window
to pee in a bush.
Exposing himself, greeting Sixten.
‘She’s good, in there—she moves, man!
Why not go in, friend?
She could dance the mirrors
off the bloody walls!
And she fancies me.’
His
piss rattles
in the under-leaves.
‘I
could have her, y’know … .
Bloody fine legs. She
lifted her skirt
above her knees, man!’
Sixten punches his face,
sends the shape tipping
into the bush’s thick,
then takes himself off.
No star.
No
pinprick of reason:
just
iced screws of pain
that can go no farther.
55
Somehow
morning.
His thoughts have led him to the edge of calling,
are on their broken knees
at the rim
of wet mudflats.
His thoughts have dragged the sky-line,
the
unvisited mud of the gulf’s edge,
with no answer.
Is she worth it?
Does she care?
She did it because …
She will leave me …
I … Let
her go. Prison?
He crouches by a sea pool
on a bar stripped by tide:
on a gulf flat, sky bare,
birds falling out there.
His thoughts penetrated
by his worst ideas.
56
Understanding, she
walks the ribbed, puddled sands
towards his withdrawal.
His agony is not one
that she can share.
In grief’s cell
he lodges alone.
Feel?
How could she feel?
It was no pain for her
to dance for the burghers.
She cannot guess
how his hours have been strained.
‘SIXTEN!
Why are you like this, Sixten?’
The breeze blows a long silence:
shuffles his hair,
swings her dress stiffly.
They do not move.
‘Did you have to show your knees?’
He strikes up, to get away,
with words like wires.
‘Stop it!
It’s not my knees
we are quarrelling about!’
He lets her cling.
Her voice submits
but states the sole facts.
‘I cannot go back for the money.
They know who we are now.’
The future appalling.
57
The moustache must
go.
Hunched in the corner of a barn
he hacks more than the stubble
from his stiff lip.
The last touch of officer goes.
This the third face she has known.
Plainer,
more haunted.
He catches her glance.
A
frown claws his eyes.
He looks at her while he dries.
She busies herself with baskets.
He busies with a cravat.
wondering what escarp,
what rampart of soul
crumbled and slid him
years deeper into dryness
when her look did not answer his.
58
What
do they live on?
The forest floor.
On hands and knees they grub
for fungi, for leaves.
They work apart,
each intent on the earth’s meal,
spitting stalks,
puffing off flies,
unwashed,
likely to stay so.
59
He edges to her like
a climber,
rests his hand on her neck.
‘Don’t
talk to me of love.
It buys no bread.’
Their quarrel.
‘Do you want me to find a job?
Can you tell me where?
Do you want me to find a job?
Where? Tell me!
What should I do?
Do you want me to go and say,
“Excuse me, my name is
Count Sixten Sparre.
I’ve deserted from the Swedish army.
I wonder if you’ve a job for me.”
Is that what you want?’
60
All afternoon
they sit apart
on a bank of an overhung stream,
the water clear to its stones,
the reflections incessantly broken.
A stalk travels by them,
a caught branch.
The sun is broken.
He huddles,
hunched by the water that shows him broken.
She huddles downstream,
sees her own face, its hundred parts
that run through the forest’s loins.
And they had hoped that their trance
would stay common to them. For
ever.
He writes a note.
Floats it downstream.
She takes it, limp, as it passes.
‘Forgive
me.’
61
And stumbles to him.
They fall together
in the caked leaves,
hugging fate
into each other.
A
damp hum
above the brook-run,
a worry of mosquitoes.
62
Their food fungi,
rough skins, pulp,
beech-masts, bilberries, sorrel.
Their knees scored by roots,
hair matted like veins,
nails broken.
On all fours,
they lick earth’s crust,
suck the husks,
swallow the ground-food,
tongues like rope, lips cardboard.
She
is sick.
63
They have not one øre
left
but they take a room.
Watch the rain down a window.
She crouches upon their bed, chin to knees.
He sits on a chair.
The rain washes their minds,
hedges thrash gravel.
The weather worsens.
64
The reckoning is
made.
Not ‘Was it worth it?’
but ‘How shall we pay?’
She: ‘There is only one way.’
He calculates
for a sacramental arrangement.
65
And visits an inn
to gamble on his arm’s strength.
Matt shadows, workmen
from sawmills, jetties,
drinking the night away
down to the marrow.
Sixten the odd one,
instantly tarred by their mood.
If he loses
he will fill their mugs (which he cannot).
If he wins
he will gain one loaf of bread.
The fight is arm against arm,
his elbow on the table,
and his opponent’s elbow.
Two hands clasped
to see who can strain
the other’s knuckles to the plank.
Elbow to bare elbow
with the young forester.
Forearm’s belly to naked
forearm,
fingers locked,
knuckle in knuckle’s grip.
A fist beast with
the fight inside it.
Two sweating palms.
Two stones grinding.
The tavern drunks cloak round,
making their bets,
generous with opinion,
take sips,
remarking on styles.
‘Get at him, Palle! At
him!’
‘Watch the Swede!’
Sixten’s arm trembles backward.
If he should lose
then how could he find the strength
to lose at that game
where absolute loss is called for
when he joined the women?
Five inches more and his fist
will
be on its back.
He rams his shoulder
back over the pivot.
Sixten leans his face near
Palle’s jowl.
Sixten keeps his shoulder
behind his hand.
Their arms are
boxers hugging.
Then Palle sags,
then is half-way to the level on his side.
Sixten cracks
the
forester’s arm to the table.
Picks up the loaf,
a prize which a death’s-head pierrot
would not have played for.
Edgy to leave.
66
This is not quite
the end.
Steals into a hen-house.
Lean body
almost see-through against
the wall’s whitewash.
Steals,
hand
out
into the hen-coop.
SQUAWK!
Fuss of feathers.
Has four eggs in hand.
67
She sits in a window
seat,
smiles at his game,
the tiptoe across the farmyard.
They will not break each other’s heart.
They will be kind
in the way they suffer.
‘How do you like your eggs boiled?’
She leaves the window.
‘Four minutes.’
She comes half back.
‘From…, or after it boils?
‘From after.’
The water is whistling.
From after it boils.
68
They walk to a sandy
down
that leads to a forest.
They trudge down a tufted slope,
basket over his arm,
where the edge-of-town children play.
Hunger,
moan of the pit,
makes her stumble.
She collapses against him.
He lowers the food.
Holds her to his side
as she slips,
as the earth gropes prematurely for her.
She is loose,
conceding,
knees snuggling in sand.
He drags her awake,
arm under arm takes her up,
and their basket,
up the precarious hill.
69
The
leaves are in clusters
yet are singular.
Their love flows
towards singular deaths.
Is it worth the pain?
When death insists,
it is worth the pain
of being whole, briefly?
They reach the trees.
70
Cloth spread.
Bread. Eggs.
Last meal.
A sanctifying.
He chews, or tries to.
She cannot.
Her face beds into his shoulder.
He holds on.
Slips his hand into the basket.
Puts the pistol to her head
as he holds her.
The gnats sing their song,
and will, when these are gone.
Life lasts.
Words are glue on his tongue.
‘I cannot.’
‘You
must,’ she whispers.
‘You must, Sixten.’
Her skin-smell
intoxicating.
The barrel of her hair…
He lowers his hand.
71
Oh, la!
She rises.
Picks dead leaves from her dress.
Idles
into the ferns.
72
Chases a
half-hearted butterfly,
searches for the faulty white
as
a thing she remembers
with child hands
held
fluttering,
(‘Are you happy?’)
pursuing the intangible,
her dress
belle
époque
her hands
trembling for wings
held out.
73
He steadies his aim.
Fires.
Fires.
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