The Umbrella
Helga had always – unreasonably – expected more from life than it could deliver. People like her live among us, not differing conspicuously from those who instinctively settle their affairs and figure out precisely how, given their looks, their abilities and their environment, they can do what they need to do in the world. With respect to these three factors, Helga was only averagely equipped. When she was entered in the marriage market, she was a slightly too small and slightly too drab young woman, with narrow lips, a turned-up nose, and – her only promising feature – a pair of large, questioning eyes, which an attentive observer might have called ‘dreamy’. But Helga would have been embarrassed if anyone had asked her what she was dreaming about.
She had never demonstrated a special talent of any kind. She had done adequately in public school and had shown good longevity at her domestic jobs. She didn’t mind working hard; in her family, that was as natural as breathing. For the most part she was accommodating and quiet, without being withdrawn. In the evenings she went out to dance halls with a couple of girlfriends. They each had a soda and looked for partners. If they sat for a long time without being asked, her girlfriends grew eager to dance with anyone at all, even a man with a hunchback. But Helga just stared absent-mindedly around the venue, and if she saw a man who appealed to her – those who did always had dark hair and brown eyes – she gazed at him so steadily, unguarded and serious, that he could not help but notice her. If someone other than her chosen one approached her (this didn’t actually happen very often), she looked down at her lap, blushed slightly and awkwardly excused herself: ‘I don’t dance.’ A few tables away, a pair of brown eyes observed this unusual sight. Here was a girl who wasn’t going to fall for the first man who came along.
Over time, many small infatuations rippled the surface of her mind, like the spring breeze that made new leaves tremble without changing their life’s course. The man would follow her home and kiss a pair of cold, closed lips, which refused to be opened in any kind of submission. Helga was very conventional. It wasn’t that she wouldn’t surrender before marriage, but she had it in her head that she would have a ring on and present the chosen man to her parents before it came to that. The ones who were too impatient, or not interested enough to wait for this ceremony, went away more or less disappointed. Sometimes she felt a little pang at those moments, but she soon forgot about it in her life’s rhythm of work, sleep, and new evenings with new possibilities.
That was until, at the age of twenty-three, she met Egon. He fell in love with her singularity – that indefinable quality which only a few noticed and even fewer judged an asset.
Egon was a mechanic who was interested in soccer, playing the numbers, pool, and girls. But since every love-struck individual is brushed by wingbeats from a higher level of the atmosphere, it so happened that this commonplace person started reading poetry and expressing himself in ways that would have made his buddies at the shop gape in wonder if they had heard him. Later he looked back on this time as if he had caught a severe illness which left its mark on him for the rest of his life. But as long as it lasted, he was proud and delighted by Helga’s carefully preserved chastity, and when they had put on rings and the presentation to her family was over, he took ownership of his property on the prepared divan in his rented room. Everything was how it was supposed to be. She hadn’t tricked him. Satisfied, he fell asleep, leaving Helga in a rather confused state. She cried a bit, because here, in particular, she had been expecting something extraordinary. Her tears were pointless, since her path had now been determined. The wedding date was set, supplies were gathered, and she had given notice at her job, because Egon wouldn’t have her ‘scrubbing other people’s floors’ after they were married. Her friends were appropriately jealous, and her parents were content. Egon was a skilled laborer, and therefore slightly higher up in the world than her father, who had taught her never to lower herself in this world, but not to ‘cook up fantasies’, either.
That evening, Helga had no clear premonition that something fateful was happening to her. Even so, she lay awake for a long time, without thinking of anything in particular. When she was half-asleep, a strange desire came drifting into her consciousness: If only I had an umbrella, she thought. It occurred to her suddenly that this item, which for certain people was just a natural necessity, was something she had dreamed of her whole life. As a child she had filled her Christmas wish-lists with sensible, affordable things: a doll, a pair of red mittens, roller skates. And then, when the gifts were lying under the tree on Christmas Eve, she’d been gripped by an ecstasy of expectation. She’d looked at her boxes as if they held the meaning of life itself, and her hands shook as she opened them. Afterward, she’d sat crying over the doll, the mittens, and the roller skates she had asked for. ‘You ungrateful child,’ hissed her mother. ‘You always ruin it for us.’ Which was true, because the next Christmas the scene would repeat itself. Helga never knew what she was expecting to find inside those festive-looking packages. Maybe she had once written ‘umbrella’ on her wish-list and not received one. It would have been ridiculous to give her such a trivial and superfluous thing. Her mother had never owned an umbrella. You took the wind and the weather as it came, without imagining that you could indulgently protect your precious hair and skin from the rain, which spared nothing else.
Helga eventually turned her attention to her role as a fiancée, and, together with her mother, carried out the customary obligations. Yet sometimes she would lie awake next to Egon, or in her bed in the maid’s room in the house where she worked, nursing her peculiar dream of owning an umbrella.
A certain image started to form in her mind, which gave her secret desire a forbidden and irresponsible tinge, and cast a delicate, impalpable veil over her expression throughout the day, causing her fiancé to exclaim, with jealousy and irritation, as if he suspected her of some kind of infidelity, ‘What are you thinking about?’ Once, she answered, ‘I’m thinking about an umbrella.’ And, with convincing seriousness, he said, ‘You’re crazy!’ By then he had already stopped reading poetry, and he never mentioned her ‘dreamy eyes’ anymore, which didn’t mean that he was disappointed in any way. It was just that now she was a permanent part of his life and routine. She sat through countless soccer matches with him, without ever grasping what it was about this particular form of entertainment that made people shout hurray or fall silent as if possessed.
The image that arose from her memory was this: she was about ten, sitting in the window of the family bedroom, looking down into the courtyard, which was illuminated with a weak glow by the light over the back stairs. She was in her nightgown, and should have been in bed, but she had developed the habit, before going to sleep, of sitting there for a few minutes and staring out into the night without thinking about anything, while a gentle peace erased the events of the day from her mind. Suddenly, she saw the gate open, and across the wet cobblestones of the courtyard, onto which raindrops splashed in an excited rhythm, strolled a pretty, dreamlike creature. Her long yellow dress nearly touched the ground, and high above a profusion of silky blond curls floated an umbrella. It was not like the one Helga’s grandmother used – round, black and dome-shaped, with a solid handle – but a flat, bright, translucent thing, which seemed to complement the person who carried it, like a butterfly’s radiant wings. It was just a brief glimpse, then the courtyard was deserted as before, but Helga’s heart was pounding with strange excitement. She ran into the living room where her mother and father were sitting. ‘A lady was walking across the courtyard,’ she said softly. Then she added, with awe and admiration, ‘She had such a nice umbrella!’
She stood there barefoot, blinking into the light. The familiar room, which lacked anything with a comparable essence, now seemed to her cramped and poor. Her mother looked surprised. ‘A lady?’ she asked. Then the corners of her mouth turned downward, as they often did when something displeased or bothered her. ‘It’s that girl next door,’ she said sharply. ‘It’s scandalous.’ Then Helga’s father turned to her with a flash of anger. ‘Why the devil are you sitting staring out the window when you should be in bed?’ he yelled. ‘Get in there and go to sleep.’
She had seen something that she wasn’t allowed to see. Something had been let into her world that wasn’t there before. After that, every evening – even though she was an obedient child – she crept over to the window to watch the yellow dress drift across the cobblestones, in all kinds of weather, but always with an inexpressibly sweet and secretive air, and always accompanied by that mysterious umbrella, visible or invisible, depending on if it was raining or not. This vision had nothing to do with the sleepy face that appeared in the neighbor’s door frame when Helga knocked to borrow a bit of margarine or flour for her mother, who was always short on the most important ingredients when she was making gravy. And it made no noticeable difference when, one day, this neighbor moved away. For a long time, the child still waited at the window for that long, yellow dress and the buoyant, translucent umbrella. When the nightly passage through the darkening courtyard stopped, she just shut her eyes and listened to the rain splashing against something taut and silky and more distant than all her childhood sounds and smells.
Copyright © 1952, 1963 by Tove Ditlevsen & Hasselbalch, Copenhagen
Translation copyright © 2022 by Michael Favala Goldman
