The Trouble with Happiness by Tove Ditlevsen

Author:Tove Ditlevsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

BOOK TWO

The Trouble with Happiness

The Knife

He lay there intensely observing his sleeping wife, as if she represented a mathematical problem which needed solving before he could move on to other things. He always felt a certain tenderness toward her just before he woke her in the morning. But this passed quickly, and she rarely noticed it. He heard their son padding around in the nursery, coughing quietly and talking to himself. Their son knew it was strictly forbidden to wake his parents.

He turned toward the wall and shouted, ‘Okay, Esther, it’s eight o’clock!’

This was his usual morning greeting. One of the duties he adopted, for some obscure reason, was to show his family a cool and slightly accusatory tone, which was supposed to express his general attitude toward life, and reinforce his own estimation of himself as a rational person who disdained sentimentality. He didn’t have his wife’s picture on his desk at his office, and, unlike his colleagues, he didn’t walk around with little photographs of his offspring to flaunt at any time. Still, they were both almost constantly in his thoughts, though the actual nature of the relationship was difficult for him to determine, just as he found it hard to differentiate one from the other. They existed like shadows inside him, thought-fetuses he couldn’t get rid of, products of a weakness in him which he tried with all his might to overcome. They were in the way of his plans, and they made him distracted and irritable, precisely at times when he needed to harness his energy. He often thought: My life would have evolved quite differently if they weren’t around. He had still been studying when he met Esther. He wasn’t really sure if he would have married her if it hadn’t suddenly become necessary. This was a question he asked himself many times a day, without ever finding an answer, or delving into what value such an answer would have for him, considering how things stood. But he didn’t like the idea that his life could be determined by chance. Things and people were something you reached out for, when they could be useful to a certain end. Either you used them for something, or else you risked being used by them.

He sat up in bed looking silently at his wife, who was sitting in her slip, combing her hair in front of her dressing table, unconcerned about her half-nakedness, as if they had been married for twenty-five years. She smiled at him in the mirror, hesitantly, guiltily, a bearing that was a natural reaction to his, but didn’t annoy him any less.

‘Why in the world don’t you get dressed before doing your hair?’ he asked crossly.

Without responding, she stood up and went into the nursery. In a tone as if he were still a baby, she said, ‘Good morning, honey.’

She was spoiling that boy. She was sucking all the independence right out of his body with her motherly fuss, but he would show them both – though he wasn’t really sure yet what he would ‘show’ them.

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