1.

I am searching for a good place to cry. It is not at all easy to find such a place. I have ridden around in a bus for several hours, now I’m sitting on a rickety bench, all the way out on the coast. There are no ferries here. Only a barge that hauls livestock back and forth to an uninhabited island.

I live in a suburban house with several windows facing the street. Maybe it would have helped to wash some of those windows. On the other hand, you can’t see out for all the evergreens. Last summer was wet, they grew like hell. Now it is winter, and I won’t be going home again. Usually at this time of day I’m napping on the sofa. Bjørnvig is freezing a wart.

It’s blowing hard. The wind smacked my face when I stepped off the bus with my wheeled suitcase. The sky over the ocean is dark gray. To the right, on the pathway down by the water, a man in coveralls is having great difficulty biking. He pitches himself forward toward the handlebars with every pedal stroke. I bike this way myself, that’s why I don’t bike. He stops and gets off. Scans the ocean, puts his hands on his hips. He knows I’m sitting here. I look down at my hands in my pigskin gloves.

He’s back on his bicycle, continuing along the ocean. It is only a matter of time before he turns off the path and rides past the small shed, down toward me. He walks the bike on the final stretch here. His hair is dark and thin. But he isn’t that old, he’s a few years younger than me.

“You look all settled in,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You’ll likely be sitting here quite a while.”

“I noticed that,” I say, from deep within my shawl.

We both glance at the sign with the bus schedule, then at the suitcase.

“Well, have a nice time then,” he says, and climbs on his bicycle. He pedals off and lifts two fingers in a wave, up and down. The wind is at his back now, quickly he is gone.

I don’t what I was thinking of with this chicken salad croissant. I eat with my gloves on, flakes of crust drift down onto the lap of my coat. I am forty-two years old and still I never seem to learn. I eat the croissant from the middle out, and I haven’t brought along any napkins. I stand up and brush my coat off, get mayonnaise on both my arms. My legs are stiff. Sit myself down again. It’s getting dark, the wind grabs at the roof of the shed.

He is coming back, this time with a woman, both of them on foot. Like him she is wearing coveralls. They hold hands, not letting go until they are right beside me.

“Hi,” she says. “Did you know the next bus isn’t until tomorrow? There’s only one bus a day here.”

“Yes. I saw that.”

“Are you waiting for someone, maybe?”

“No, not really.”

“You want to borrow a phone?”

“No, thank you, it’s not necessary.”

“We’re Putte and John,” she says. “You really can’t keep sitting here. There’s a storm on the way that’s practically a hurricane.”

“We can’t have that,” he says.

They lift me up, each taking an arm. He pulls the handle out on the suitcase and rolls it along behind us. The wheels make noise on the blacktop. They live in a small house without a front yard, the stucco looks newly finished. A hoop of ivy and an oil lamp in every window. She opens the front door. The hallway is narrow, with a pine stairway at the rear. They take their shoes off and we walk into the living room. A fire is burning in the woodstove. I stand in the middle of the floor. She walks out and comes back a little while later with a glass of water, which she hands me.

“Why are you both wearing coveralls?” I say.

“We just got back from the dogs,” she says.

She has turned on the TV, now she’s sitting on the sofa. The weather is on, she leans all the way forward.

“You think the fence will hold?” she says.

“Else we’ll figure something out,” he says, and then to me: “Sit down, sit.”

I drink my water while they chitchat. I don’t really hear what they say. Putte gets up to fetch the local paper. She flips through the pages with her feet up, her thighs are a bit stocky. John mumbles while he follows along from over her shoulder.

“They should have already got that done last year,” Putte says, and shakes her head.

“Yeah, but, you know,” John says.

“Anyway.”

They go through the entire paper this way. Then she folds it up and gives him a little slap on the knee with it: “What’s on the menu?”

“Con carne.”

John chops onions and sniffles out in the open kitchen, Putte unbuttons her coveralls and throws them over a chair. She has on leggings and a loose checkered shirt underneath. Ski socks outside the leggings. She takes a cigarette out of a pack lying on the shelving, lights it and walks over to John, sticks the cigarette in his mouth.

“There’ll be no crying now,” she says to me.

She sits down and watches TV. Yawns a bit. Stretches out halfway on the sofa, reaches for a throw and pulls it over herself. We watch the local news. She falls asleep. I study her face, she might only be half my age.

I fall asleep, too, in the chair. When I wake up John is setting the table. He sets out the salt and pepper and folds the napkins neatly in half. He wakens Putte by tapping two fingers on her forehead.

“Aren’t you going to take your overclothes off? That shawl, for instance,” he says to me.

“I suppose.”

I look down at myself; my coat has both a zipper and buttons. A few threads from the shawl’s fringe are caught in the zipper.

“May I also use your bathroom?”

“Go right ahead.”

He points over his shoulder to out behind the kitchen and makes a whistling sound with his teeth:

“Whhhht. That way.”

While we eat Putte tells a long story about her father, who apparently lives in Næstved. He has been to the doctor to get medicine for Putte’s brother without the brother’s knowledge, of course the doctor wouldn’t write a prescription under those circumstances, then her father had difficulty breathing and felt pins and needles in his fingers, he had to have a glass of cold water, but when the doctor also brought out a plastic sack from Lidl that her father was supposed to breathe in and out of, he slapped her hand away and said:

“Get that shit away from me!”

Putte’s father embarrasses her, she thinks he acts like a little kid. John defends him:

“But she knows Eskild.”

“Yeah, but anyway. It’s embarrassing to Ibber.”

Ibber is the brother, I see. Putte shakes her head and takes a sip of milk. John is drinking water, and so am I.

“Do you like this? You don’t need to eat it all,” she says to me, and a moment later:

“John is the cook of the house. Nobody around here can fix a pork roast like him.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he says.

The bowl is empty. Putte scrapes it with an index finger and sticks the finger in her mouth. It doesn’t look like they are going to smoke after the meal. John gets up and puts the coffee on. Putte watches his back and plays around with her braid. I look at my hands, I don’t know what it is with these hands.

“We go to bed early,” Putte says. “The sofa is all yours. It’s good to lie on.”

“We’ll get the eiderdown out of the attic,” John says, from the kitchen. “We’ll let it hang for a while by the stove.”

“This is probably the right time to say that you shouldn’t be going to a lot of extra trouble,” I say.

Putte doesn’t bat an eye: “Oh, we don’t have a damn thing to do anyway. We just walk around here with our whiplash.”

“We’d like to have something else to get into,” John says, and they laugh heartily, both of them. John sets a cup in front of me, he puts a vanilla wafer on the napkin and another on top of it and another and another. Putte teases him:

“One more, John. So we can play tumbling towers.”

“I would like to go over to the island,” I say.

“What island?” Putte says, and takes the topmost vanilla wafer. “That one out there?”

“That little one right over there.”

“That’s the heifer island,” John says.

“Now?” says Putte.

“It’s used for grazing. Pilegård owns it.”

“There’s a small cottage behind the trees.”

John takes one vanilla wafer, then another, and talks with his mouth full of the cookies. “It’s a nice little spot.”

“Not when the heifers are grazing,” Putte says.

“Would the cottage be for rent?” I say.

John laughs, granules spray from his mouth. “Pilegård would rent his mother out if he saw something in it for himself.”

“Pilegård’s money pouch is pure moleskin,” Putte says, she’s spraying cookie too.

“Don’t you want a cookie? You’re something of a lady,” John says.

“I’ll go on up and find the eiderdown,” Putte says, and stands up, her braid swinging in the air.

“No. Unfortunately I’m not. No thank you,” I say.

“That’s that, then,” says John, and scratches his chest through his coveralls.

2.

I lie on their corner sofa with my feet tucked into the corner. The wind blows hard, it whistles around the house. The light from the streetlamp moves erratically around the room. The eiderdown’s cover smells of fabric softener. No sounds come from up above now. At first I heard their voices as being in two different keys, their words indistinguishable. They talked a long time. At one point they laughed. Gradually the pauses between sentences grew longer and longer. A sentence and an answer and a short answer. Pause. A short sentence. Pause. Answer.

I turn on the small lamp above the sofa and sit up. Reach down for my wheeled suitcase, pull it up to me and open it. I did pack my wool underwear, I thought I had. I’ve brought along some scarves, too. I don’t recall putting five lint rollers in the suitcase, but I must have had my reasons. I linger over my knee socks. Four pairs. Also there is a pair of Bjørnvig’s long socks, they’re a bit grubby. He wears them inside his rubber boots, usually he walks around in white wooden shoes.

There are footsteps up in the bedroom. Then on the stairs, and then the living room door eases open. Putte is in her nightgown, her hair loose.

“How about a game of Uno?” she says. “We’re not getting any sleep in all this.”

She nods outdoors, the storm is crashing through the street.

“That sounds fine.”

I set the suitcase back down on the floor and sit up straight. Putte shoves the table against the sofa and lights up tea lights. The cards are just inside a large green trunk.

“This is where we keep our games,” Putte says. “We have seventy-two. There’s lots of jigsaw puzzles we’ve put together and torn apart, but we have lots of board games, too.”

“I don’t know how to play Uno.”

“You don’t have kids?”

“None myself, no.”

“You know any?”

“Any?”

“Yeah, kids.”

“A few.”

“Don’t they play games?”

“They sit around sometimes with something.”

“It’s Uno, got to be. It’s a real kid’s game.”

“They’re almost not kids anymore.”

“Oh. They’re big kids.”

“Yes.”

“Then they probably don’t play Uno.”

She explains the rules to me, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it. So we chat about my moves as we play:

“Now you can play a green or a six,” she says.

“Now you can play a blue, or you can switch to another color.”

Something is banging around outside. Putte says it’s the wine barrels they use to collect rainwater. One of them is almost empty and has a lid on it, it bangs against the other one. The barrels come all the way from Hungary. A woman imports them, she runs a shop in an old gas station and sells practically everything, Putte works for her. At first they sold salami and smoked eel, but people thought they could taste engine oil. Now they sell things from all over the world and Fuglebjerg. Second-hand silverware and bedding. Elves all year round. Small tin things.

“It’s probably not anything you’re interested in,” she says.

“I do sort of like elves,” I say.

“We’re only open Friday-Saturday-Sunday this time of year. But now you know, just in case. It’s nine kilometers inland on the highway. The intersection after the roundabout.”

“I’ll remember.”

At one point I almost fall asleep while Putte shuffles the cards. She looks up at me and then at the wall clock, it’s a quarter past two.

“That’s it,” she says, and gathers the cards, puts them in the box and back in the trunk. “Time for some sleep. Let’s hope the house is still here tomorrow. Good night.”

“Good night.”

“Yeah, good night, then.”

“Good night.”

She lingers in the doorway, looking at me. Lifts her hand as a farewell gesture and shuts off the last lamp on the small extension table. I lie on my side and pull the eiderdown all the way over my head, the storm is a dim, far-off disturbance, my legs grow heavy.

So this is where I find myself. In a small, newly-stuccoed house with two kind people out by the coast on a corner sofa. Beside an old green trunk. One possibility would be to empty the trunk and plant your body inside until you stopped breathing, but on the other hand it would be a lot of work, all those games and cards. The roof is creaking from the storm. It’s not what I want to do, either. I turn over on the sofa. The strong odor of fabric softener. Friendly strangers. The possibility of stepping onto a bus and then later onto another. I won’t be any wiser later on, that’s to come.

(Excerpted from the Novel. Translation by Mark Kline.)