I Curse the River of Time Read Online Free PDF

that hymn.
    And so I walked up Danmarksgade in the half-light, the bottle tucked under my arm so the brown paper bag could been seen by all, and I was a man who had just bought this bottle of French alcohol very early in the morning, as soon as the shops had opened their doors, a man to be found in the movies only, and in certain books, mostly older books, written at the time of the Second World War, or just before, where the action was bound to a time that was long gone, and yet here I came walking, right there and then, adrift in time and space.
    When I got to the summer house, I walked across the lawn, past the shed under the heavy dark pine branches with mybag over my shoulder and the bottle tucked under my arm, but my mother was not in the summer house though the door was unlocked. In fact she never locked it, not while she was there, not until she went back to Norway, and then she would turn everything off anyway, the water and electricity; my father was the one who locked up. He was always locking things; suitcases, bicycles and doors, and then later he would search like a maniac for the key while the rest of us stood there impatiently, shuffling our feet and freezing our arses off, waiting to get inside, thinking, how typical, how bloody typical. ‘You can never be too careful,’ he would snap, his face blushing in the cold.
    There was a book on the table, not Günter Grass this time, but Somerset Maugham, in English, an old Penguin paperback of The Razor’s Edge , about an American pilot who travelled to India after the First World War where he experienced a spiritual change, and that book had always annoyed me, it is a hippie book, I thought, or at least has turned into one, why the hell would she want to read that book now? I put my bag down and went back outside, still holding the bottle, and walked between the pine trees, along the gravel road to the end where the dog roses grew thick and left the road to follow the path through the marram grass to the beach. It was quite windy and I saw her at once. She was sitting on a low sand dune with her warm coat wrapped tightly around her and her collar turned up against the wind, and the wind whipped her dark curls, and I thought, she has not gone grey yet, at least not much, though she was now over sixty, and she sat there alone, her head held high like she always did in a way some foundarrogant. But really she was just preoccupied and was staring dreamily across the sea, probably thinking about something quite different than what was in front of her while she smoked a cigarette; a Cooly I guessed, or a Salem, or, more likely, the cheaper Danish menthol brand, Look.
    I am sure she heard me coming, but she did not turn around. When I was quite close to her, I called out softly:
    ‘Hello!’
    Still she did not turn around, merely said: ‘Don’t start talking right away.’
    ‘It’s me,’ I said.
    ‘I know who it is,’ she said. ‘I heard your thoughts clatter all the way down from the road. Are you broke?’
    Jesus Christ, I knew she was ill, that she might even die; it was why I was here, it was why I had come after her, I was sure of it, and yet I said:
    ‘Mother, I’m getting a divorce.’
    And I may have seen it from her back, how she pulled herself together and shifted her weight from one place inside her body to another, from where she was, to where she thought maybe I was.
    ‘Come here, sit down,’ she said. And she moved to one side as if to make room for me, though there was plenty of it and she patted the wiry grass and said almost impatiently:
    ‘Come on then!’ and I walked up and sat down beside her on the ledge. I took the bottle from the brown paper bag and placed it between my feet, twisted it into the white, powdery sand, so it would not keel over, but I do not think she noticed. In fact, she did not even look at me, and that made me feel uncomfortable.

5
    M any years before, in the early Seventies, I went to a college in the Dælenenga