Savage Love Read online

  Olga makes love with Gurn in the hayloft. This is during Christmas dinner when, once again, the whole family celebrates together and Ma cooks the usual roast pig and turnip dumplings. It’s a surprise to everyone, including Olga and Gurn. Bjorn goes to the front stoop for a smoke and hears her cries of ecstasy and discovers Gurn with his trousers at his ankles, thrusting between Olga’s legs from behind (on account of her ponderous belly), his twisted mouth twisted into a fantastic grin of delight, the loft floor shaking beneath them, the brilliant greens and golds and pinks of Pa’s epic painting climbing the walls like smoke, like dream maps. Olga had not intended this, but something about Gurn’s scars had lately begun to obsess her. She wondered what it would be like to kiss those awful lips, wondered if poor Gurn had ever made love, wondered at the degradation of submitting herself to his disfigurement. After a couple of tumblers of potato vodka, she lost all inhibition. Instead of trying to explain this to Bjorn, she merely spreads her legs in a languid motion and allows him a better view of Gurn’s veined erection sliding into her thatched vulva. Her underdrawers bag around one ankle. Her smock rucks up at her throat, revealing her vast fertile belly and distended breasts with nipples like dinner plates. She imagines herself a picture of filth and female satisfaction, an ancient oriental princess being serviced by a slave on a couch of damask and leopard pelt. But Bjorn barely notices her after he spies a grown pig, painted like the map of the world, peeking warily from a niche in the hay bales. The pig’s eyes meet Bjorn’s eyes with a look of terror and wisdom, a fatalistic look that makes Bjorn suddenly ashamed. Gurn comes with a shout of dismay. Olga shuts her eyes and seems to settle into herself, the image of saintly depravity. Bjorn envies the pig and Olga and even Gurn for their animal natures, for their ability to abandon decorum and act out of avarice and desire, just as he envies Pa for his ability to live in a barn and irresponsibly paint pictures while farm and family go to ruin. Bjorn, the straight arrow, has a gold watch and fob, symbols of rectitude, his mastery of time, like a lock on his soul. Rather than feeling the usual tumescent jealousy at the sight of Olga’s amorous paroxysms, Bjorn now senses a vast pity in his heart. He understands that Olga is hungry for love, that she feels trapped in her marriage, in her plainness, in her pregnancy, all those forms of living that have nothing to do with the person she knows herself to be, that she longs for the thrill of something real, a strange man’s touch, beyond reason or obligation, his breath on the nape of her neck, his hardness probing her most intimate parts. He also understands that Olga understands that he understands. Gurn, who understands nothing, thinks, Why does she love strangers and not the man she loves? In the dining room, Pa and Ma pet and flirt shamelessly. Pa tweaks Ma’s nipples through her dress with his paint-smeared hands. Jannik, the wastrel, lowers a proprietary arm over Agnes Botgaard’s shoulder. He announces their impending marriage; he doesn’t want to marry her but has vowed to live a better life after betraying Bjorn so egregiously with his pregnant wife. (Actually, the baby is Jannik’s, though no one except Olga will ever know this.) Jannik is taking accounting courses and has applied for a position in the bank. He published a poem in the town newspaper. Out of guilt, he wants to become his brother, though every move in that direction makes him feel as if he is lowering himself into a grave. Agnes looks radiantly happy, although this is only because her engagement to Jannik has provoked Herr Grimmig’s jealousy and he has invited her for a New Year’s Eve punch at The Wingless Phalarope. Aunt Doreen sits in a corner sipping thimbles of potato vodka with her lover, their hands clasped, their thighs pressed together in a line to their knees, their faces hovering so near that they breathe each other’s breath. Since Amy Rastinhad arrived, no one has heard either woman speak a word, but they are inseparable and spend most of their time behind the locked bedroom door. When Bjorn, Gurn, and Olga return from the barn, young Trig slips out the back and, in the distance, they hear the death shriek of a sow. This is a week after Nikolai disappeared, when the whole family went into a hysterical panic until the boy was discovered hiding in a neighbour’s doghouse with the last of the shoats. Hearing the pig’s dying cry and imagining the tide of clotting blood dripping through the haymow planks, Bjorn knows that he is unequal to the task of being a poet, that reality is too real for him ever to capture it in a rhyming couplet, that there is too much violence, drama, and wayward passion to fit into a sonnet, that form deforms the truth just as decorum deforms personality. Every step he takes, Bjorn feels as if he is lowering himself into a grave. To everyone’s delight, Uncle Boris capers about, uttering nonsense rhymes, dressed in Bavarian hunting costume. He tells them he has taken the day off and will not be moving the manure pile. He knocks over the Christmas fir, trying to climb into its higher branches.

  Bjorn wins a national prize for his poetry. He is lauded in the media as “the banker poet.” Bjorn vows never to write another poem and, under the pseudonym Alonzo Cutlip, publishes a critique condemning himself as a conventional, sentimental, bland hack (which, as a poet, he is). “What does it say of the poem,” he asks, “if it is praised in the gutter press, finds favour with the usual editors, and is read with pleasure by the illiterate masses? One must aim to write the unreadable poem!” Olga delivers a baby boy, the very image of Jannik right down to the widow’s peak twisted into a spit curl at the top of his forehead. He has a flirtatious (wastrel) look from the start. They call him Bjorn 2 or Little Bjorn. Agnes Botgaard breaks off her engagement to Jannik after her New Year’s Eve tryst with Herr Grimmig. Jannik is crushed, his heart is broken. He drops in at The Wingless Phalarope, drowns his sorrows in nineteen glasses of Pilsner with peppermint schnapps depth charges, kisses Tamara Winzcheslon under the mistletoe in front of her lover Joran Boze for half an hour (sets fire to her lonely heart), then visits his favourite casino, The Abyss, and wins a small fortune at blackjack. He forgets to cash in his chips, but an alert floor manager presses a bag of zlotys into his hands. The stock market slumps, consumer confidence turns into suspicion and doubt. Pa becomes the leader of a booming art movement called the Even More Eccentric Rural Primitives, made up mostly of retired schoolteachers, unemployed factory workers, and young college graduates who can’t find jobs, all painting rapturous mythic murals on the walls of their apartments in imitation of the Master. Famous art auction houses offer to sell Pa’s barn to the highest bidder. In the villages and suburbs nearby, children begin to disappear with alarming frequency. Uncle Boris strolls up and down the front walk with his hands in his pockets, unable to think of anything better to do now that there are no more pigs and the manure pile has been replaced with recycling bins. Aunt Doreen whispers to Pa that her relationship with Amy Rastinhad is dwindling. She dreams, at night, of naked men, admits to Pa that perhaps she is only in love with what she cannot have. One day, a taxi pulls up at the gate, and Aunt Doreen hands Amy Rastinhad’s bag to the driver, and the tall, elegant woman in the flowered hat rolls away in a cloud of dust, a pink monogrammed hanky waving bravely at the taxi window. Daphne elopes with an orchestra — not a member of the orchestra, but the entire string and reed sections. No one tells Pa, which, for him, is a relief. Grete, much too young for romance, continues to receive the blind, elderly man, whose name is Mr. Quimby. Someone hears her say, “I will be your eyes.” (When she says the words, they are full of gentle innocence and selflessness, in contrast to Daphne, for whom the words are an unconscious tactic in a game of erotic conquest.) She reads to him in the front parlour where no one ever goes except during those periodic joyous family get-togethers. Sometimes she leads him through the barn, stopping before the great, soaring, glittering panels to describe the colours and stories. Mr. Quimby says to Pa, “These are wonderful pictures. I can tell by the smell of the paint.” Gurn cheerfully writes and rewrites his will. He puts his affairs in order, and then he puts them in a different order. Bjorn tries to love little Bjorn 2 but can’t. He resigns himself to an empty facade of dutiful parenting just as the sensitive Bjorn 2, realizing what is what, res
igns himself to a joyless imitation of a childhood. Soon Bjorn 2 and Bjorn begin to resemble one another, they wear the same stern, blank expression in the face of life’s furious injustice. Without the baby inside her, Olga looks like a collapsed balloon. She feels even less attractive. At night she lies next to Bjorn in an agony of frustration and desire, but his touch makes her skin crawl, not the touch she desires. She accuses Bjorn of being a homosexual because he doesn’t make love to her. She accuses him of sleeping with Herr Grimmig. She recites whole litanies of his failings and betrayals. For a man so infuriatingly polite, faithful, dutiful, earnest, and socially conscious, Bjorn has a lot to answer for. Lisel is diagnosed with emphysema and walks around with her cigarettes, books, and an oxygen tank like a literate deep-sea diver dragging her aqualung on a cart. To everyone’s amazement, she abandons her close reading of the Apocrypha in Aramaic and begins studying translations of ancient Sanskrit erotic texts. She confesses to Pa that she has been secretly dating an unemployed dishwasher named Joran Boze whom she met in the town library where he was trying to find a job on the Internet. Nights, Lisel and Joran meet at The Wingless Phalarope, where she takes off her oxygen mask so they can kiss and sip peppermint schnapps. As often as not, they will find Bjorn working over the bank’s balance sheets, also sipping peppermint schnapps (in those distinctive tall shot glasses with the strange seabird design), absent-mindedly dandling Bjorn 2 on his knee. In the kitchen, Tamara Winzcheslon and Jannik, the wastrel, will be throwing plates at each other, squabbling about his wastrel ways, after which they rush upstairs and make love with wild abandon. At some point, Uncle Boris breaks an arm falling out of the tree.

  *

  Bjorn dreams that Pulch, the cobbler, accosts him in the street with a shout. “Your shoes are ready!” Pulch holds out a pair of strangely shaped workboots with hobnails and laces up to the ankles. But the boots are only half complete, with toe tips missing and gaping open like a cross-section. Bjorn knows somehow that these are miner’s boots. He needs them to go underground. At the pithead, there is a bustling confusion of smoke, flame, and milling crowds. An awesome black tower of girders and cables rises above, supporting the machinery of the mine lift, a mighty gate to nowhere. Bjorn descends in a cage filled with grim soot-faced men, women, even children, also dogs, horses and pigs, all with lamps, helmets and shovels. Their faces are sombre and frightened as the lift drops down and down, faster and faster, and the rank walls of the mine shaft disappear and are replaced with an inky blackness. The mine shaft is inexpressibly cold. Bjorn’s face aches with the wind of the cage’s falling. In the distance now, he sees stars, whole constellations and galaxies he doesn’t recognize. Still the lift descends. A beautiful woman (who somehow reminds him of Olga) touches his cheek with a finger and whispers, “You’re going home. Don’t you know?”

  The story ends with a wedding. One evening Jannik catches Tamara Winzcheslon’s eye as she polishes bird glasses behind the gleaming phalarope-shaped beer spigots — a little girl’s pout, vulnerable dip of her irises, look of love. The curve of her belly just inside her pelvic crest is the most beautiful thing Jannik has ever seen in his life. Like all dead fishermen’s wives, she is a sexual renegade between the sheets simply because she already knows how things will end. Is it love he feels? Jannik is dazed by the sublime horror and mystery of the question. And he cannot answer it. But, as a lifelong wastrel, he is equally incapable of denying the instinct that tells him marriage to a woman who owns a profitable bar is a prudent option. It will be neither the first nor the last time a human being does the right thing for the wrong reason. The wedding is supposed to take place under a tent in the front yard at the farm. But the weather is so promising that Pa orders the tent taken down as an aesthetic monstrosity that obstructs his view. Then a fog rolls in off the salt marsh, and a gentle rain begins to fall. Music is provided by an itinerant klezmer band called Prophets in the Wilderness (friends of Daphne). The local justice of the peace officiates (a man named Frank Mahovlich who has narrow shoulders, a pot-belly, bad breath, a wandering eye, a moth-eaten tailcoat, and is otherwise extraneous to the story — you can just assume he has his own plot problems). Two couples stand up before Frank Mahovlich: Lisel and Joran Boze and Jannik and Tamara Winzcheslon. Everyone agrees the occasion is sweet and holy. The young women (Tamara, actually, not so young) wear the usual white meringues that make them look awkward, overweight, embarrassed, and brazen all at once (Lisel somewhat encumbered as well with her breathing apparatus). The grooms wear identical too-tight dinner jackets and canary-yellow cummerbunds (Pa picked the colours); freshly shaved and glistening, they look, to Bjorn, like penises tied with bows. Muttering to himself, Uncle Boris rehearses dirty jokes for his speech, picking his way nervously amid goose squirts and cow pats. A fresh batch of shoats gathers beneath the banquet table (Pa buys them for companionship; they don’t seem to last long). A general atmosphere of bashful lustiness, uncertainty, mystery, solemnity, terror, and misplaced hope pervades the drizzly scene. At the last moment, in an access of joy (Ma had just bent over to taste the turnip salad and he caught a glimpse of the rabbit mole on her breast), Pa falls to his knees and proposes that they marry again. Ma squeals and exclaims that it’s the best proposal she’s ever had, and she accepts.

  Bjorn, misty-eyed from the mist, can’t help but smile. For no reason, he gives Olga a little poke in her deflated belly. She glances up at him irritably. Bjorn is thinking about Bjorn 2, how they have become inseparable, united, apparently, by their inability to love one another. No one has ever understood Bjorn as well as Bjorn 2. With a jolt, a sudden ache like a gas pain, Bjorn realizes that maybe this is love. Olga sees that he is smiling and thinks, Oh, Bjorn is being idiotically sentimental or just idiotic. But he keeps smiling, and there is something strange in his eyes, an expression that is at once sad, distant, weighing, thinking, alive. Olga feels a pang of compassion. It occurs to her that Bjorn can see his death coming toward him. Bjorn thinks: The universe is a complete mystery to me. How should one behave? What does it mean to be a human being? All my life I have seen my death coming toward me. Then he says an astonishing thing, words that break the form, a blind leap. He says, “We should get married too.” Olga says, “What?” Waspish, irritable, impatient, surprised, puzzled, bitter. Bjorn says, “We should get married again. I think I haven’t loved you enough. I married you the first time out of pity because you were the last of the ugly Klapp girls and without a dowry. Don’t mistake me — I thought that was love at the time, but now I see it differently.” He keeps smiling that inane smile. He feels suddenly free. All the world’s cares, responsibilities, and claims seem to drop away. He understands that he is giving up on himself, and that, paradoxically, he has never felt more like himself. He feels like a corpse climbing out of a grave. Olga takes a breath and thinks, Perhaps I have been holding my breath these ten years. There is a trace of a smile on her lips. She says, “I am plain as a pine plank.” “Whoever said such a thing?” says Bjorn. “The author,” says Olga. “Besides, it’s true.” She says, “I was always afraid you’d never like me, that you’d run away.” “It doesn’t matter,” says Bjorn, a bit irritated about the author. “I love you now.” Olga asks, shyly, tentatively, still with the faint wisp of a smile breaking on her thin lips, “Even after all the bad things I have done?” “Because of everything you have done,” Bjorn says. “They are signs of life,” he says. “I want to start again,” he says. There is another of those pregnant silences. Suddenly, Bjorn and Olga realize everyone is watching. No one has seen Bjorn and Olga hold a remotely friendly conversation in years. Now they are clasping hands, shyly offering themselves to Mahovlich’s ritual mumbling.