Havoc by Tom Kristensen

Author:Tom Kristensen
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-04-03T12:27:20+00:00

7

THE FORENOON was brilliant with sunshine after the previous day’s rainy weather, and the buildings on Reventlowsgade exuded a fresh coolness.

Jastrau halted at the corner of Istedgade and looked pensively up at his fifth-floor windows. The windowpanes dreamily and innocently mirrored the clear sky, but the wall around them still had a clouded, ravaged look after the previous day’s rain. It was a dreary north wall with dissolute old windows that reflected a wholly undependable image of blue sky.

Jastrau felt chilly as he looked at them.

He did not want to stand there any longer in his two-day-old evening clothes, the white tie that hung drooping from his collar, and the crumpled shirt front with its inscription hidden behind the top-coat. He would attract attention if he stood there bareheaded and gaping. But those sky-blue window panes. What was it that had gone on behind them? Who had been there and told Johanne about him? Who? And what had he told her? She had sounded so tired, so sad, and at the same time so aloof over the telephone the night before, and it was not like her. It seemed that he had hardly been able to recognize her voice.

How strange it now seemed to go in through the door again. The yellow walls had suddenly become invested with a significance, a historical significance, and the stairway had taken on a patina of an existence that now was a thing of the past. Even the hole in the windowpane, through which the breeze had blown unimpeded for an entire summer and winter, had become something more than a symbol of neglect. It was now a characteristic feature of the premises, an artful dimple on the face of the house.

As Jastrau slowly made his way up the stairs, he could not refrain from whistling one of the jazz tunes he had heard over in the Bar des Artistes. Its rhythm had now taken hold of him because he had experienced so much during the hours that it had been droning into his ears, and he knew that it would remain with him all his life and that it would always signify divorce, the end of the life he had known. He had heard it all the previous evening until he had gone and tumbled into his hotel bed, and now he would never forget it.

When he stood in the hallway outside his door, it suddenly dawned on him that he had no keys. Sometime in the far, far distant past, he had tossed them into the taxicab to Johanne. But he went on whistling calmly. That melody—“I wonder, I wonder, I wonder”—kept running through his head. It had become an obsession with him—a nemesis that kept haunting him. “I wonder, I wonder.” And calmly, as if in rhythm with the melody and with his fate, he bent over, moved the doormat, and found the keys beneath it. Johanne had been that clear-headed and prudent.

But the sight of the apartment, the rooms, the furnishings that he had lived with for a number of years, took his breath away.

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