The Now Deceased Member of the Mikkelsen Family

The Mikkelsen family was not doing well. To put it bluntly, they were sad. It was as though someone had died in their family, someone they valued highly. But when they counted heads, no one was missing.

— It’s completely incomprehensible, said the Mikkelsen father, whose name was Hans, one evening as he cleaned the juice from his pipe stem.

Dorte, who was also called Mrs. Mikkelsen, put aside her daughter’s green blouse, and looked into his eyes.

— No one is dead, Hans. I’ve counted and counted! We’re all here!

— We are not, and you know it, and the little girl knows it, too. She mourned so it hurt, Dorte!

— She had to bury that canary if that’s what you’re referring to, Mrs. Mikkelsen said and picked up her daughter’s green blouse again.

— But would she have mourned that much if a human being had not passed on to our Lord God?

— Its head had been bitten off.

— Yes. That happens in the animal world, Mikkelsen the father said and scraped the last of the pipe juice out onto a napkin which he carefully folded and put with the other pipe juice napkins with which he had built a kind of castle.

— Someone is missing, Dorte. Someone who’s gone and left an absence in here. As he said “in here,” he twisted the pipe around in front of his chest and closed his mouth in a painful grimace. The closest I can come to it is that she has always been here.

Dorte shook her head so her large, permanented curls hopped.— With all respect, Hans, but . . .

— SOMEONE VERY VERY ESSENTIAL IS MISSING, who gave meaning to it all.

— And who would that be . . .

Mr. Mikkelsen made an almost imperceptible gesture with his hand. Like a bow. A feminine bow.

— Yes. I don’t know exactly, Dorte, but it’s more a feeling.

— That feeling, is it . . . a little like missing a blouse one knows one has but can’t find at the moment? asked Mrs. Mikkelsen and brought her daughter’s blouse to her face and sniffed and smiled, dropped it so it fell onto the floor.

— Yes, you could say that, Dorte.

— Then I think I can follow you.

— You can?

— Yes, as long as it’s something physical, then I can understand, Dorte said and took hold of Hans’s turtleneck sweater of napped velour, which she began at once to stroke as if trying to draw forth some kind of memory. Overall, Dorte was a much more physical sort than her husband. She understood nothing until she had touched it. Hans remembered with horror the morning she had sat for a full hour on a chair in his little apartment and hugged his sweater until she suddenly smiled with warmth and said that now she could feel that she loved him. It had been so terribly embarrassing. Because Hans was a man of intellect. He knew that when his brain said, “She is delicious,” then she was delicious. He knew from the first moment that Dorte was right for him, and he had babbled endlessly about her beauty while she sat with her nose buried in his unwashed Icelandic sweater. That was how it had been then, and that’s how it was now. It’s in clothing and physical things one can know the truth, she often said. Hurry up, Dorte! Hans said. Yes, yes, Dorte replied and drew her fingers around and around on Hans’s stomach, every so often uttering a little cry of recognition. His shirt was white and blue with a ship on it, and despite Hans’s impatience, he had to accept her pawing the ship and let her nails pinch at all the cheap Chinese needlework with which the ship had been sewn onto the shirt. It was like a brail he didn’t understand. Dorte just sat there and touched and touched and understood. But by God she came to the same conclusion. Abruptly, she let go of the shirt with a gasp.

— You’re right Hans . . . someone is missing!

— That’s what I’m saying! Oh God, it’s so wonderful you can see that, too, Dorte. You have no idea how alone one feels when such a loss hits one. But who is it that’s left us? Who is it — tell me, Dorte! Hans said and imperceptibly made that feminine gesture with his hand.
 

— For me it’s not a woman, Hans, it’s a big man whose knee I sat on when I was small.

— A big man?

— He was always there when I was afraid, the way children tend to be afraid.

Hans went to the window and looked out at a woodpecker that for some reason or other was hammering its beak into a blue titmouse instead of a tree, as woodpeckers usually do. Jealousy already had arisen in him. He loved his wife.

— No, that’s enough. There have never been any big men in our family, he snapped.

— On my side there were many, in great-grandfather’s time, Dorte elaborated. — I’ve seen photographs of a number of big men, who among other things were involved in building the state railway.

— But not now. We’re talking about now. About a person who made an impression on us here and now in our miserable life from 1950 . . . on.

— I agree, Hans. Completely. Someone has just been here and now is gone. Can it be someone who went on a trip? Aren’t Henrik and Annelise going to southern Sweden for a dog?

— Yes, but they’re not dead.

— But they are very much loved.

— Not by me, he said. I never liked the way Henrik’s teeth sit. It’s as though his mouth is full of slush. It goes sklash. Sklash, sklash. He reminds me of something that should have been thrown out a long time ago.

— Perhaps we should talk to the children about it?

— About Henrik? Why?

— No, about our deceased family member. It can be hard on children to lose someone! Dorte said and reached out for his stocking feet.

The Mikkelsen father rose immediately and hitched up his pants, then sat again.

— Yes, you’re right. In any case they mustn’t be left on their own with it. We’ll have to talk to them and tell them it’s something you can get over.

— And that one who dies lives on in our hearts.

— And then memory comes into it and helps us remember the good things about that person before she . . .

— He! Dorte insisted.

— He or she died.

Dorte nodded eagerly. — No, because people don’t lose each other that way — the body . . . no but . . . the corpse disappears, that’s clear, the rest goes on being there and is talked about at family gatherings with . . . with sorrow and joy.

— With sorrow and joy, that’s right, Dorte. Despite the absence of the physical, the memory lives on in those left behind, that is quite right, Dorte. Well thought, said Hans.

— We can take them to visit the grave and lay flowers there and sit for a while and whisper . . . “Hi.”

— Yes, well thought, Dorte — it’s always good to have flowers and those rituals surrounding it. And the children will get much better at dealing with it. A lot of elderly people go around with watering cans out there, it can happen that our children have to fetch water, and in that way will touch the unknown elderly and in that way they will also feel that others have lost someone before them.

Dorte lowered her face toward the table and wept.

— Poor uncle, he was such a good person.

But Hans was up immediately, shaking her.

— YOUR UNCLE IS STILL HERE! PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER . . . as though it wasn’t enough with this mourning.

— Yes, really, what is it I’m crying about, Dorte gasped. And let her fingernails dance over the ship on his shirt. —What is it that’s making me so sad?

— The loss of another, Dorte. The loss of another. We’ll have to phone around and hear, there must be someone who knows something.

— But Hans, we consist of a maximum of twelve people with grandchildren and all, they would have phoned us if there was someone who’d passed away.

— Who says they can call? This sort of thing often happens on a ski trip, it’s a kind of feeling in the diaphragm which is frequently confirmed in the following manner: “This is the police, we regret to inform you that . . . so and so has been killed in an avalanche.”

Dorte shook her head and accidentally dipped a permanented curl into her coffee cup.

— No, I don’t think it’s a catastrophic death, I think more that he just passed away.

— She! growled Hans, irritated. And brushed invisible manly crumbs from his shirt.

— HE OR SHE, yes, I think more it was one of those expirations after a long life, where shoes or bootees were tried and purchased and children came into the world and small wonders were observed, as happens now.

— I think so, too, that’s also what has shaken me so, that we can’t guess who it is, when it was someone who meant so much to us that…

This time it was Hans’ turn to break down a bit. He tried to turn away, but Dorte could see his shoulders trembling the way they do when one is sad.

— There, there, Hans, you’re not going to cry as well, are you?

— No, you’re right. It’s just so doubly unfathomable that someone can die and we don’t know who!!!?

— All at once he felt so small. His pants threatened constantly to glide down. It was as though sorrow was making Mr. Mikkelsen smaller and smaller and his pants bigger and bigger. Dorte sighed. Hans whimpered. And stopped trying to hold his pants up. Dorte took his hand and squeezed it. Hans, in turn, leaned toward her face with his shirt.

— All this time together and we don’t even know who it is!? But, isn’t it awful, Dorte.

Dorte nodded and shook herself. And let her cheek press flat against the red sailboat on his shirt. The needlework sang in her ear. (It was essentially an incredibly ugly ship. It was meant to resemble a fishing boat but looked more like a tub sewn hastily in Ken Yan province.) For once she felt completely satisfied with impressions. Everything was deciphered in that shirt.

— I really want to stay home from work.

— I’ve already done that, said Hans.

— What did you tell them?

— That I couldn’t come in because there was a death in the immediate family.

Dorte went into the next room and returned with a stack of four or five photo albums.

— Could it be one of these, Cousin Bjarne, for example?

— Cousin Bjarne?! Come on!

— Isn’t he dead?

— He certainly is not! I play golf with the man every Thursday.

— He could be dead anyway, Hans, it happens.

— I spoke with him just an hour ago, he thought I’d filched one of his irons. Anyway it would have to be a big person, otherwise we wouldn’t feel such a loss, would we?!

— No . . . Dorte said and brushed the photographs a little with her pinky. — No, that’s what I’m saying, I sat on his . . .

— Shut up and put those albums away! NOW, I said. I will not waste my time staring at deceased idiots in suits in some kind of lighting from a hundred years ago. They’re gone. Totally gone, Dorte. Okay?

— It’s our new dead family member then!

— Exactly, and you know what I think?

— No?

— I think we should announce the burial and get it over with.

— But what if no one has passed away?

— The priest can just say some tasteless words, Dorte, words we anyway have put together ourselves, and the coffin will be burnt anyway, and the rest is just, well, the rest.

— But you can’t do that, they look inside of it, the ones who . . . arrange the eyes of the dead person.

— Eyes?

— Yes, put blue pins in the eyes of the dead.

— No one does that, do they? Is it the undertaker you’re thinking of?

— Yes, and then there also has to be oranges in the mouth of the deceased so they look nice when he or she goes past the pigs that hang roasting in the land of the dead.

— No one does that, do they, Dorte?— Yes, but not until they’ve sawed off the arms and set them properly in the hands of the deceased.

— What kind of horrible nonsense is that, Dorte?

— It’s not nonsense, it is my individual interpretation of death. I have a right to that as a modern human being.

— Indeed, but it is in any event an expression of a very, very sick thought process, my dear, the undertaker certainly doesn’t have time for all that nonsense when they prepare the deceased, I can tell you that. For them it’s just straight business and orderly procedures. Get rid of the bugger.

— He’s not to be buried!

— SHE, GODDAMNIT IN HELL! WHAT DO YOU EXPECT US TO DO? WE CAN’T FOR GOD’S SAKE LET HER LIE THERE AND ROT! THAT’S NOT HOW WE DO IT IN THIS COUNTRY. HERE WE BURY OUR DEAD, DORTE, AND YOU KNOW WHAT, I REFUSE TO LET THAT MEMORY LIE ROTTING INSIDE ME. THE LADY HAS GOT TO GO. PERIOD.

Dorte hunched, confused. In desperation she began to caress the salt mill. She considered beginning a course in writing. She had heard about people who had taken courses in writing. She had also heard about a high school teacher who just quit his job in order to put words to the thoughtsthat caused him pain. And now he went around wearing a cap and arranging poetry festivals. Dorte was giddy with delight. The salt mill was good to put your nails in because it was structured in two parts, held together by a screw. It was so delightful to touch something completely simple.

Are you listening at all? We are talking about a person who was here before us, Dorte. Not just any old insignificant great grand cousin.

— Okay, if only we could come a little closer, Hans?

— ONE CANNOT DO THAT right away. Sorrow makes us blind and absent-minded, yes, we’re kilometers away from the one we lost. Our feelings flee, like, to northern Norway for example.

Dorte pictured an atlas. Some atlases were contoured so you could feel the mountain ranges and gorges. But she could see no connection between what had happened and northern Norway.

— I don’t understand that.

— Sorrow is always deep at first, honey. It doesn’t really help to long and search in our aching mind, right when sorrow lies like a fog over everything we do and think.

— Do you think that’s what makes it impossible for us to see whom we’ve lost?

— Absolutely. I had a friend who . . .

— Greenlander Mike?— Yes, he lost his father and couldn’t remember where he was and so couldn’t attend the funeral.

— Isn’t that because he drank a lot?

— No, it was sorrow, Dorte. Sorrow over the loss of his father. And what the hell is the idea of mixing alcohol in with sorrow? Why must you always mix that in with anything that has to do with Greenlander Mike?

— Because he has a weak character, Hans.

— I’m mourning, woman!

— Sorry.

— And you’re mourning.

— Yes.

— And our little girl is in deep mourning.

— Yes . . .

— We don’t know who’s dead but it’s someone who means something to the Mikkelsen family, am I right?

— Yes . . . I have no idea what to do with myself. My breasts are sagging.

He nodded in confusion and continued:

— And maybe we’ll never find out who has passed away, but most likely it was a little beautiful woman.

— Or a big strong man who put me on his knee when I was little . . .

— Yeah, right . . . so far so good. Now I’ll phone the family and tell them we’ve had a death.

— And what if they ask about him and want to know who it is?

Hans let his tears stream freely for a moment and cleared his throat softly.

— Then I’ll appeal to the family’s compassion and sentimentality that we’ve all inherited.

© Jens Blendstrup

Jens Blendstrup was born in Denmark in 1968 and made his debut with the wildly inventive story collection Mennesker i en mistbænk (People in a Greenhouse) in 1994, which was followed by the satirically sensitive picture novel, Dame til fornuftige priser (Reasonably Priced Women), the firecracker collection Laterna Vagina, and six radio plays, one of which was awarded the Prix Italia. His first novel Gud taler ud (God Speaks) came out in 2004 and established Jens Blendstrup as a popular Danish author. (Photo © Lars Gundersen)

Translator Thomas E. Kennedy has published many stories, essays, translations, poems and book reviews in American literary journals such as New Letters, The Literary Review, American Poetry Review, Agni, Fiction, and many others. He serves editorial functions for The Literary Review, Absinthe, Pushcart Prize, and Best New Writing/The Eric Hoffer Awards. Among many other awards, he has won Pushcart (1990) and O. Henry (1994) prizes and the Frank Expatriate Writing Award (2002). His most recent books include the four independent novels of The Copenhagen Quartet (2002-2005), the novel A Passion in the Desert (2007), story collection Cast Upon the Day (2007), and two essay collections due out in 2008 — Writers on the Job (with Walter Cummins) and Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America. He guest-edited the spring 2008 issue of The Literary Review devoted to New Danish Writing. Kennedy is a core faculty member of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program. He lives in Copenhagen.