The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

33 Anneli 1940

By mid-November I’d simply stopped going to class. I’d met a kind woman who took pity on me when she found me crying on a bench in the Rosenborg Gardens. As soon as the embassy car vanished around the corner, I walked towards a dark red door at the bottom of the street and rang a bell marked ‘A. Bellini.’

Her name was Anneli, a well-groomed lady with a red rose in her coal-black hair and pale, padded cheeks. She generally sat at a white-clothed table under a tall window, gazing through the blurry glass with a beautiful but melancholy countenance. One could see a white gable and part of a brick wall and, between them, a portion of the street. I felt she was constantly peeping between the two buildings, as if she were expecting someone.

She was married to an Italian countertenor who was now a pilot in Mussolini’s air force. He had participated in the invasion of France, one of the most ludicrous operations in the total absurdity of the Second World War: Italians in the flower of their youth sacrificing their lives so that the word tabac could be changed into tabacchi on some tobacconist’s signs in a few Alpine villages.

That was in June and now it was November and the little rose lady no longer knew where her tenor was singing – whether he was stuck in his wreckage on some cold Alpine peak, delighting the inhabitants of heaven with his high Cs, or happily gallivanting in his boots down the streets of Nice having traded in his Danish love for a French one, singing his arias through revolving hotel doors and hot vulvas.

We sat there for long mornings and played cards, listening to Caruso spinning on the gramophone, and I told her all about the Icelandic ambassadorial couple while she instructed me on the tragic nature of love: ‘Happiness is the most dangerous thing. Because the higher it takes you, the greater the fall.’ Otherwise we just sat there for long stretches in silence, an eleven-year-old Icelandic girl and this beautiful Italo-lovelorn Danish woman, who in my mind was forty, fifty or sixty but was probably only thirty. She was prone to shutting up mid-conversation and staring out the window for a long moment, like a dead-still porcelain doll who only occasionally fluttered her eyelashes – long, black, and so even they seemed to have come out of a factory. On her forehead were three birthmarks that formed a love triangle.

She grew paler by the day, and every time I said goodbye she would give me a gift: a notebook, a gramophone record, a pearl necklace, earrings, lipstick. ‘Use dark red during the day and vermilion at night.’ Instead of memorising the names of Russia’s big rivers and Sweden’s lakes, I was learning how to become a lady, taking classes in makeup and jewellery.

‘Have you ever wanted to be called something else?’ she asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘What?’

‘Dana.’

‘Dana?’ she said, stretching out the vowels. ‘That’s a nice name. You can be Dana whenever you need to be, then. We women need to hang on to whatever we can.’

Anneli was mourning two lost loves – the good and proper Per, who had loved her too much, and the Italian for whom she had abandoned him. Emilio had sung to her and a throng of enraptured women on the deck in the Scandinavian twilight, and she married him on the same day the luckless Per stepped in front of a bullet in the Funen forest.

Now she sat in her high-ceilinged apartment at Sølvgade 6 discussing the logic of the heart with a snivelling little girl from the outer islands. ‘Never allow yourself to be ruled by the heart or the mind. Get the approval of both.’ That was a lesson that was worth more than thirteen years in a Danish school, and I would have done well to follow my Anneli’s little piece of advice. But needless to say, I forgot it as soon as I passed the door’s threshold and only remember it now, a whole lifetime and a hundred men later.