Wild Swims by Dorthe Nors

Author:Dorthe Nors [Nors, Dorthe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

HONEYSUCKLE

THE YEAR BEFORE HE MET HER, HE’D BEEN DOING research on the immune system at NYU, as part of his medical studies. It had become a habit for him to make his way home through a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. They didn’t welcome strangers, but he was discreet and would act as if he were on some errand. The women went about in long dresses, and now and then he found an opportunity to observe a couple of them on a street corner. Drably dressed, no makeup, long skirts and sleeves. To most Western men they might seem lacking in imagination, but there he stood, watching them with a palpable erection.

He had that way of coming to a standstill over there. In July, when the heat was at its height, he sometimes came to a halt by the big flower beds in Central Park. The irises stretching upward, the scent of roses, and in one place honeysuckle. He would stand there in the sun, thinking of his parents’ yard in Risskov. Perhaps he was longing for home, but mostly it was for the way everything seemed when seen from the street. Or when one looked at the family in old photos. These days his mother tried to avoid the camera, and his father didn’t own one. He devoted himself to gardening instead. In front of the house was an area with pruned yews and cedars, while roses were tended in the backyard. On the south gable end a honeysuckle grew. When it was in flower, its sweet odor settled over the yard, and then he didn’t know how to feel about anything.

But when he returned to Aarhus in ’88, he discovered her on a couch in Hasle. She had a withdrawn face. It didn’t really occur to him till afterward, but she did. The thick lenses, the black hair, the smallness of her eyes. She was sitting with two girlfriends on a couch. The other two were good-looking, he remembers, yet next to the black-haired one they quickly faded away. Tea was passed round, and cookies, and she sat by the padded armrest in a summer dress and said she was studying to be a social worker. He would be continuing his research in immunology at the university hospital, and he couldn’t stop staring at her. It was the way her mouth moved, the words disconnected from her eyes. Out in the hallway, he asked her how much she could actually see, and then she placed a fist in front of both eyes. She did it to illustrate that there was a small tunnel of clear vision, there where her fingers didn’t close completely. She’d been born that way, she explained; her eyes weren’t properly alive, and it was true. There was something untouched about her, and on the bike ride home it struck him that her face was withdrawn, and that that was why he almost couldn’t sit to pedal.

In the days that followed it was hard to find any peace.

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