Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

Author:Tove Ditlevsen [Ditlevsen, Tove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241391754
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

One day Lise comes down to visit us and tells me that Ole is inviting a lot of young women to a ‘Tubercular Ball’ which they are holding at the Rudershøj dormitory. Ebbe is upset that he can’t go, but there are already more than enough men, so it’s no use. I’m happy to be invited, because my short-story collection is finished, and I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not writing. Lise says that the dean’s wife’s son will be there to lure his mother to bed early.

When we get there, the party is in full force. People are dancing to a local band, and none of the students look any worse than Ole, who is the picture of health. A big-chested woman comes rushing up to welcome us. She is evidently the dean’s wife. I dance with lots of different men in a large, open room with a parquet floor and high-backed chairs along the walls. The dormitory is located in a large park, which is veiled that evening by a rainy haze, greenish, black and silvery under a misty moon, sailing between the clouds. A bar has been set up in a kind of foyer, with a counter and high chairs and a bartender who is pouring real liquor and not pullimut. For some reason I feel happy and free, and I have a feeling that something special is going to happen before the night is over. I’m drinking whiskey, and I get drunk, jolly and impetuous. On one of the barstools, Sinne is sitting on a young man’s lap. I sit next to them and say traitorously, You’re betting on the wrong horse; she’s engaged to a black marketeer. The young man brushes Sinne off as if she were a fleck of dust. I never thought, he says to me, that poets could be so beautiful. Then, from the shade of the lamp, his face emerges, and I find myself observing it with the attention of a painter of miniatures. He has thinning reddish hair, relaxed gray eyes, and teeth so crooked it looks like they are in two rows. It turns out he is the dean’s wife’s son, and has completed his medical degree. I’m surprised to meet a student who has actually finished. He dances with me, and we trip over one another’s feet and have to give up, laughing. Then we take a walk in the park. The night is clearing and the air is like damp silk. He kisses me beneath a silver-gray birch tree, then suddenly his mother comes rushing out to us with her undulating violet silk bust and waving arms. Young people nowadays, she pants. The contents of her mind are expressed primarily in half-intelligible sentimental outbursts. Then her son, whose name is Carl, remembers his promise to the students to take his mother home to bed, and he mutters something to me about us getting together later, and he disappears into the building with her.

Then the party gets wilder.

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