Asta's Book Read Free Page B

for escape. I think of it, her escape from me, as a hard swim against great breakers that keep her struggling, pushing her back. And that’s how they come out at last, babies, swimming, thrusting against the tide, and opening their lungs to cry with relief when at last they reach the shore.
    I must press on, I must be strong, come what may. Sometimes I think of Karoline that my father left on the streets of Copenhagen to find her own way to his house. She told me the story herself, for my mother never would, it was too improper for me to hear, and I am sure my father had forgotten all about it. But Karoline herself could never forget, the experience lurked there always in her mind like a goblin and she dreamed of it.
    My father came to Copenhagen from a place near Aarhus in the north of Jutland. He married my mother, who was half-Swedish, and did quite well, owning property and buying and selling furniture, and the time came when he thought my mother should have a maid to help her in the house, so he sent home to the farm for one of his nieces. They were so poor and there were so many children that you can be sure they were delighted to get rid of one of them. Karoline came. She was fifteen and she had to cross the Store Bælt and the Lille Bælt by ferry and take the train and do these things all by herself. She had never been anywhere, she couldn’t read or write. She was like an animal, a farm animal.
    My father met her at the railway station. It was a long walk to our house, several miles, and the poor girl was just an animal. When she needed to relieve herself she did what she had done in the country, moved a little aside—in this case to the gutter—lifted up her skirts, and squatted down and made water in the street. My father was so shocked and so angry he took to his heels and ran away from her. He had forgotten or made himself forget that this was how they behaved where he came from, he was nearly a gentleman now, so he ran away home, not looking back, running through the twisting streets and by the back alleys.
    Karoline had to get there as best she could. She knew no one. She spoke with a coarse accent many couldn’t even understand, she didn’t know the address, only that the name was Kastrup, and she had never been in a city before, not even Aarhus. But she found her way, she had to. It took her till midnight but she found our house. I’ve never known how. ‘I asked a hundred people,’ she said to me. ‘I asked everyone I saw.’ At least when she got there my father didn’t turn her away.
    She was with us as our maid for many years. When I was sixteen and my mother died, Karoline too died of a monstrous cancer that grew out of her back. She can’t have been more than thirty-two or -three. She was already ill when she told me the story and it’s been an example to me, something to think of and keep me going when I’m close to despair. I say to myself, Karoline made it and so will I. I’ll get through and come out the other side.
    July 14th, 1905
    I have heard from Rasmus and he has sent me money. Hansine was covered in smiles, her fat face all red and nearly split in two, when she brought me the letter this morning. I’ve said she can’t read but she can recognize his handwriting and a Danish stamp.
    ‘Dearest Asta’, he calls me, and, later on, ‘my dear wife’, which is not at all the way he speaks to me, I can tell you. (What do I mean ‘you’? Have I begun talking to the diary?) Never mind. There is money, just when we were beginning to think even frikadeller were beyond our means and we’d be reduced to broken biscuits and Butterine.
    It was a money order for 700 kroner, which comes out at nearly £40, the most you’re allowed to send. I took it to the Post Office in Lansdowne Road and they cashed it, making no trouble, asking no questions and not even smiling at my accent.
    Now, at any rate, I shall be able to buy material to make baby clothes and have indeed done so already, white