Youth by Tove Ditlevsen

Author:Tove Ditlevsen [Ditlevsen, Tove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241405567
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

12

Rumors of my poetic abilities have reached the print shop, and now orders come in every day. Carl Jensen receives them and brings them to Miss Løngren, who is still the only one I stand in direct contact with. I write songs for all kinds of occasions and when I go over to hand out the pay envelopes, the workers thank me, embarrassed, and just as embarrassed, I say that there’s nothing to thank me for. I write songs and in shorthand I take important messages to the brothers or obituaries of dead brothers. They’re printed in the Order of Saint George newsletter. All of this doesn’t have much to do with office work, but Miss Løngren won’t train me; when she was on vacation, everything was on the verge of collapse because I didn’t know the first thing about anything. When I turn eighteen, I’ll apply for a real office job and no longer work as a trainee. Then I can get a much higher salary. When I turn eighteen the world will be different in every way, and Nina and I will have the whole night at our disposal. Then I’ll also have to see about getting rid of my virtue – Nina is very set on that. She herself was only fifteen when the forester took hers. Whenever we go out in the evening, she takes off her engagement ring. She only goes to bed with those young men who are not unemployed, and I haven’t told her about Kurt. That’s an experience I want to keep for myself. If I had lived in a room, I would have taken him in. But I don’t know whether I would have taken in other young men who have walked me home and kissed me in the entryway. One day when Nina is pressuring me again because of my scandalous virginity, I tell her that I want to be engaged first. That’s not something that I’ve thought about before, but the decision relieves me. In reality there has only been one real prospective buyer for my virtue, and it’s a little embarrassing, because Nina talks as if everyone is out after it. Now that Aunt Rosalia is lying at home sick, my mother is a lot less concerned with what I’m doing. All day she sits in there by my aunt’s bed, talking and laughing, and in the evening she goes to bed early and lies there, talking on until one of them falls asleep. My father has become totally superfluous in her world, and I think she would be completely happy if my aunt wasn’t going to die. My aunt is yellow in the face and her skin is so stretched over her bones that you’re continually reminded of her skull’s existence. Her skin is so tight that she can’t even close her mouth all the way anymore. If she’s awake in the evening when I come home, she calls me in and I sit down by her bed for a while.

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