March 25, 2021 45
sion on him.... Gently he puts his
arm around my waist and a hot
stream races through me. Is this
love? I’m so tired of my long search
for this person that I feel like
crying with relief, now that I’ve
reached my goal. I’m so tired that
I can’t return his tender, cautious
caresses.... “You’re like a child,”
he says kindly, “a child who can’t
really manage the adult world.”The roles they’ve assigned themselves
so expeditiously—of helpless, pre- sexual
prodigy and knightly rescuer—are just
plausible enough to serve for their two
years of marriage; after all, many mar-
riages are built on nothing more sub-
stantial than some similarly clarifying
piece of theater. But before the marriage
can take place, things of great import
are happening. Tove’s first poem has ap-
peared in Wild Wheat to great acclaim
and other poems have followed, Viggo F.
has introduced her into the shiny literary
social world she has imagined, and he is
in the process of getting a collection of
her poetry published.
And then suddenly:
England has declared war on Ger-
many, and I stand with thousands
of other silent people and follow
the reader-board headlines flash-
ing on Politiken’s building.... I
have a painful, sinking feeling in
my stomach.... Will my poetry col-
lection come out now? Will daily
life continue at all? Will Viggo F.
marry me when the whole world is
burning? Will Hitler’s evil shadow
fall over Denmark?Viggo F. has reason to be concerned,
given his anti-Nazi writings, but Hit-
ler’s evil shadow or no, Tove’s collec-
tion of poems rolls off the press, and
“Youth” concludes with her incredu-
lous joy at the fact that she herself has
produced a physical volume of the sort
that sustained her during her ardu-
ous childhood—and with her desire
to savor the object alone, before she
shows it to Viggo F.
The Danish title of the third volume
of the trilogy is “Gift,” which means
(stunningly) both “married” and “poi-
son” and has been translated (stun-
ningly) as “Dependency.”
The warm, nurturing bachelor Viggo
F. was quite different from the husband
Viggo F., who is brittle, reduced, preoc-
cupied, and remarkably tightfisted. In
company and with artists, he seems to
remain the original man, but while he
has a coterie of worshipful young ad-
mirers, he has his share of detractors,
too. Bets have apparently been placed
on how long the marriage will last, and
friends of Viggo F.’s (some evidently
friends who enjoy friendships based on
ridicule) say that Tove has simply used
him to get ahead.
There’s some truth to the charge, she
concedes—and she certainly has got-
ten ahead, thanks to him—but there
was more to the marriage than that.
The reader is bound to agree, and the
inevitable dissolution of the sterile,
confining, and rather absurd marriage
is as sad as its inception.
As a young, suddenly free, suddenly
celebrated writer from a working-class
background, Tove has an alluring luster.
She is invited to a party held by a group
of students in their twenties, where it
seems a foregone conclusion that she
will hook up with their most glamorous
member, Ebbe. Ebbe is home with the
flu, but he’s dragged to the party, fever
and all, to meet Tove. They dance, and
fall drunkenly into bed. “I feel happy
and loved for the first time in my life,”
the author writes.
The German occupation shades
the book’s background as a faint air
of desperation. In the foreground,
there are parties, new friends, and
great quantities of drinking. Ebbe is
charming, attractive, and sweet. He’s
also a big drinker at twenty-five and
studying economics, in which he has
no real interest, with no degree in
sight. The very friends who brought
them together warn Tove that she’ll
be supporting him if they get mar-
ried. But they do get married, and, in
fact, the marriage provides a fortress
around Tove’s real life—her writing.She is writing fluently, and reviews of
her abundant publications tend to be
glowing.
Ebbe’s real interest is literature,
and although now and again he rather
bores or irritates Tove, she’s glad—up
to a point—to have him read what she’s
written during the day. His social class
is far above her parents’, but he doesn’t
condescend to them—unlike Viggo F.,
who talked to them in a loud voice as if
they were slightly deaf.
But when their daughter, Helle, is
born, between Tove’s nursing, child-
rearing, and writing, there’s just not
quite enough love or attention left for
Ebbe, and however hard the two adults
struggle, they can’t figure out how to
reweight the scales. When Tove dis-
covers that she’s two months pregnant
again, she decides that an abortion is
imperative. “I don’t regret what I did,”
she writes, “but in the dark, tarnished
corridors of my mind there is a faint
impression, like a child’s footprints in
damp sand.”For a time, life with Ebbe, Helle, and
her writing is good. One evening, when
she’s at loose ends, having just turned
in a collection of short stories to her
publisher, Tove goes off to a party,
leaving Ebbe at home to take care of
Helle. The party is even more than
usually drunken and unbuttoned, and
Tove nonchalantly goes to bed with
somebody named Carl—a young sci-
entist who’s recently gotten a medical
degree. In the morning she wakes up
hungover, notes without much interest
that she finds Carl hideous and pecu-
liar, bicycles home, lies to Ebbe, and
realizes she’d forgotten her diaphragm,though she’s been very careful since
the abortion.
“You get pregnant just walking
through a draft,” her friend and con-
fidante Lise says some weeks later. It’s
unclear whether the child is Ebbe’s or
Carl’s, and Tove definitely does not
want a child with Carl! But at least Carl
is a doctor, so he’ll be able to terminate
the pregnancy.
As it happens, Carl calls her even
before she gets in touch with him; he’s
been reading everything she’s written
and he wants to marry her. He can
help out with her problem, he says,
but they’d make a fine child—a scien-
tist and a poet! “I already have a very
suitable husband,” she says, “and a
lovely daughter.” Oh, well, he tells her,
it might not be a great idea for her to
marry him anyhow. There’s a lot ofmental illness on his father’s side, and
his mother’s not very bright.
Up until this point, the author’s tal-
ents have made the fairly banal disor-
ders of her life riveting, but now things
take a turn, and no horror movie I’ve
ever seen—however potent its imagery
or metaphor—has come near the rest of
the book for sheer terror.
She has asked if Carl can give her
a painkiller for the procedure. The
following day, having told Ebbe she’s
going to visit Lise, she arrives at Carl’s
room for their appointment and sees
that hehas obtained a high table... and
there’s a white sheet over it....
He’s wearing a white lab coat, and
he washes his hands and scrubs his
nails, while he pleasantly asks me
to make myself com fortable. T here
are some shiny instruments on the
bookshelf next to the table.He fills a syringe with a clear liquid.
“You have good veins,” he says. He
gives her the injection,and a bliss I have never before felt
spreads through my entire body.
The room expands to a radiant
hall....
When I wake up... I still have
the blissful feeling, and I have the
sense that it will disappear if I
move.What was it he gave her? she wants to
know. Demerol, he tells her.I take his hand and put it up to my
cheek. I’m in love with you.... I
wish I could marry you, I say, strok-ing his soft, thin hair.... While I
ride home in the streetcar, the ef-
fects of the shot wear off slowly,
and it feels as if a gray, slimy veil
covers whatever my eyes see.She tells Ebbe there’s someone else—
though that’s hardly accurate—and she
and two-year-old Helle leave, moving
into an inferno with Carl that is to last
five years.
Tove gets a divorce and marries Carl
and his syringe. Sex is brief, a bit rough,
and unpleasant, but so what—her mind
is in a blissful elsewhere. “I love passive
women,” Carl comments, somewhat re-
dundantly. In order to keep him and his
Demerol bound to her, it seems she’ll
go to any length. She has a child with
him, Michael, and she takes in an in-
fant, Trine, fathered by Carl with a
woman from a prominent family that
wants to forget the whole thing. Tove
pays to have a house built that has
plenty of room for the children and for
a remarkably kind and unsuspecting
housekeeper, Jabbe. The place has a
beautiful yard with fruit trees on the
lawn, where the children will be fine on
their own—and mainly, it’s far enough
from the center of town that Tove’s
friends won’t come pestering her.
These two intelligent people quickly
become skilled at the unspoken collu-
sion that enables Carl to persuade him-
self, or some part of himself, that Tove
legitimately needs the Demerol it so
benefits him to administer to her. Al-
though their subterfuges are transpar-
ent enough, he seems at times almost
to believe that she is really in pain, that
she really can’t sleep, that she’s really
only taking what he prescribes, though
she has learned to forge prescriptions
for methadone, to which she has also
become addicted. Chloral—a potent
sedative that Carl gives her to help her
sleep—joins the list.
Tove succeeds so well in faking a
persistent earache that even when the
specialist who has been monitoring the
complaint refuses to treat her for it,
Carl apparently feels justified in hir-
ing a crank, who agrees—because he
hates the previous doctor—to operate
on the perfectly healthy ear. The result
is deafness on that side and nearly in-
tolerable pain. The hospital refuses to
provide anything stronger than aspirin,
and Carl has to sneak into the building
to give her a shot of the Demerol for
which she has sacrificed her hearing.Not long into the relationship with
Carl, when Tove has become pregnant
with Michael, she receives a spectral
visit from Carl’s friend John. John is
worried about Carl: “Has Carl ever
told you, he said, about his institution-
alization a year ago?”
Tove is having to go through ever
more trouble to stay high, those good
veins of hers have clogged up, and she
is conspicuously emaciated and dehy-
drated. Her mother shows up one day
when Carl is out and sits by her bed:
“She takes my hand and pats it. Your
father and I, she says, drying her eyes
with the back of her hand, are of the
opinion that Carl is making you sick.
We can’t say how exactly, but I don’t
think he’s right in the head.”
Sometimes Carl makes what seem to
be rather serious attempts to get Tove
to cut back on the drugs, and he tries,
though without much conviction, to per-
suade her to go through withdrawal. HisTove Ditlevsen, 1972Per^ Pejstrup/Scanpix