Bringing Gloom to Rented Rooms
“It is the path we all must take, over the Bridge of Sighs into Eternity.”
This sentence stands as one of the first entries in Søren Aabye’s journal for
- Shortly after Maria’s burial he repeated the words on a little slip of
paper. Death had called at his innermost family circle for the seventh time,
and he himself had not yet turned twenty-five, so it was not strange that he
felt like “a galley slave chained to death; every time life stirs, the chain rattles
and death makes everything wither away—and it happens every moment.”
As with the earlier deaths, he was indignant at the shallowness of the
relatives who came around with their condolences like “automatons in
motion,” reeling off pious phrases. The day after Maria’s death he wrote
full of woe: “ ‘One should love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ the bourgeois
philistines say, and what these well-brought-up children, now useful citi-
zens of the state, mean is...foronething, that when a person is asked for
a candle snuffer, even if he is sitting far from the person who asks him, he
should say ‘certainly’ and then get up ‘with great pleasure’ in order to give
it to him; and for another thing, they mean that a person should remember
to make all the appropriate condolence visits. But they have never felt what
it means for the whole world to turn its back on them, because the entire
school of herring of which they are a part—a group which always makes
the rounds—would naturally never permit such a situation to arise.”
The situation was unbearable, and immediately after Maria’s burial Søren
Aabye had to escape to Hillerød for a couple of days. Peter Christian himself
finally got away to Søllerød at the beginning of August, but the vacation
did not last long before his father ordered him back to town, where every-
thing was the way it used to be, only worse: “Lately Søren has been de-
pressed perhaps more than ever by brooding, most likely over his health,
but it makes him unhappy and unfit, and it is close to making him mad. To
judge from these last days, when things really began to go wrong, the plea-
sure trip he took on the very day of the burial did not benefit him at all.”
Nor did Peter Christian derive any particular benefit from his own vacation,
and on October 3 his father wrote to his sister Else about Peter Christian’s
condition after the loss of Maria: “His sorrow over this death is indescribable
and has a disturbing effect on his health, which was weak beforehand.” He
could not even bring himself to have her name put on the gravestone out
there at the cemetery, even though his mother-in-law Nanna repeatedly
pleaded with him to do so: “I merely wish that one way or anotherhername
could be placed on it just like the others who have been interred there.”
The three men were once again left to one another’s company and soon
resumed their accustomed roles in the exhausting triangular drama. We can