Justine Read Online Free PDF Page A

kitchen.
    It got dark and still Ane wasn’t home. Rose lay on the couch with a cigarette stub hanging from the corner of her mouth. Torben wasn’t back either.
    â€œWake me up when he gets here,” Rose said and fell asleep.
    On the water the sky sailed past in gleaming patches.
    Ane finally turned up on the third day. Torben, too.
    â€œWe were in the Tiergarten,” she said.
    Torben flipped through the pages that would eventually make a book.
    â€œShow them to Justine,” Ane said.
    Rose, who’d decided her book would just be an ash tray, lit a cigarette and stubbed the previous one out on a piece of paper.
    Torben handed me a pile of drawings.
    â€œAssholes,” he said.
    â€œAnd eyes,” Ane added.
    They were done in pen, hairy, wrinkled, protruding wreaths.
    â€œGross,” Rose said, standing up from the couch and leaving.
    Willum flipped through the pages.
    â€œWhat the hell’s wrong with her?” he said. “These are really great. Just stylized assholes.”
    â€œAnd eyes,” Ane added.
    She collected the sheets and tied a string around them, readying them to be glued and covered.
    â€œCan I see what you did?” she asked.
    â€œI didn’t do anything.”
    â€œYou didn’t do anything?”
    Of course I did. For instance, I wondered where the hell she might’ve gone. I’d gone to Tiergarten, and naturally there was no Ane, neither the kiosk woman nor the people standing at the entrance had seen her. It was all a load of crap. Berlin. Willum and his installation, too. And myself. I was also a load of crap.
    â€œThose are some fat assholes,” I said, pointing to the elephant’s iris.
    â€œWe slept in a forest,” Ane said.
    Torben and Ane stayed in the apartment that night. They put their sleeping pads on the floor beneath the window.
    Later that night, after everyone had gone to bed, an extremely drunk Rose appeared. She kicked the kitchen chairs and shouted at Torben.
    â€œWhat do you want?” Ane asked. “Can’t you just leave him alone?”
    â€œWhat the fuck do you know about it, little Ane? Why are you getting involved anyway?”
    â€œWell, I know he doesn’t want to be with you.”
    â€œHe doesn’t want to be with you either, you idiot. You insane little idiot. Sweet, stupid little Ane with all her sweet little stories. If you think he wants to be with you, you’re completely fucking wrong. You don’t know shit about him, do you? No, why should you? One woman’s not enough for him, capiche? He can’t keep his dick in his pants. Not that he goes around bragging about it. At least he’s smart enough for that. And that’s a whole lot smarter than you are.”
    â€œYeah. Well, and you, too,” Ane said, vanishing into the attic and slamming the door.
    On Friday we set out our books on the floor and went through them. In terms of melancholy, Rose’s book was the best, and Willum admitted it was good, even though he thought it’d been an arrogant way to complete the assignment. Willum was also extremely pleased with Ane and Torben’s book. You just couldn’t tell, he said, if it was an eye or an asshole staring you down.
    Torben is big. His body, his mouth, all of it. He majored in graphic design with a group of guys who sought, sought, sought toward the extremes. It has to be about men, they said, and established an artist group.
    Their first show featured some paintings they’d schlepped to a barracks out in Slagelse. Once there they’d laid them in a pasture so a private could drive over them with a tank.
    The exhibit was held in Kolding. At the opening, they sat in the gallery around a card table playing poker, drinking whiskey, and smoking cigars. Torben got so drunk that he shit his pants. In the wee hours of the morning he traipsed around the city wrapped in a T-shirt with shit running down his legs. The rumor made it around the