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Room

Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

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Vilhelms værelse first published in Danish in 1975. This translation first published in Great Britain in 2025. 001

Vilhelms værelse © Tove Ditlevsen & Gyldendal, Copenhagen 1975

Published by agreement with Guldendal Group Agency

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Vilhelm’s Room

The room is no longer there. Day after day, I saw the destruction progress behind grimy windows as I walked past with no other purpose. I would stand on the Boulevard and peer in at the white destroyers who always pretended not to notice me. Yet there existed between us a strange and fierce understanding, like in the embrace of two people who loathe one another. As I stood in the bright sunlight with my nose pressed to the windowpane, they were seized by a kind of frenzy that seemed to give them superhuman strength. They tore down the walls, lugged the white French doors out on their bare, sweating backs and tossed them into the skip outside the building. They tore up the ﬂoors with exaggerated, balletic movements: those small blocks of parquet were not as heavy as they made them out to be. Only when the high, ornate ceilings with the chubby stucco cherubs had disappeared did I lose interest in the wreckage and begin to rebuild the room inside my head. And there it lives now, fraught with whispering shadows, soft laughter like the mocking cries of birds and hot tears kissed away or allowed to ﬂow undisturbed, the way dampness seeps through wallpaper stained with passion and despair. I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm. There is no other meaning to my life. The boy is at a boarding school his

father sent him to when he suﬀered a breakdown after losing his mother. There he’s doing reasonably well. Every weekend he is visited by the girl, Lene, who looks like his mother when she was young, and they always talk about his childhood, which is grim and thrilling like a fairy tale, and Lene finds her own childhood so dull in comparison she never mentions it. As for me, I am alone, and all that I do is determined from within. Other people pass straight through me as through a shadow; only a few understand me like the destroyers did, and they too tactfully pretend not to notice me.

I’m residing in a ﬂat two doors down from the old one; I will never truly live here. The word ‘home’ has lost its meaning, it is simply something I once had. I’m sitting at my typewriter, which these days seems to dictate which keys to press. Otherwise, there is nothing in this unfamiliar room apart from my bed, a wardrobe and a dresser. The window faces a small courtyard with rubbish bins and bicycle racks, just like the courtyard of my childhood. The other three rooms are still full of cardboard boxes, but the widower has left behind the drapes and blinds, as they would not have suited the ﬂat the union obtained for him when the negotiators finally saw an opportunity to store their computer systems in what was once Vilhelm’s room. Obviously, it had to be demolished, and the negotiators with their dumb, moist eyes were, just like the destroyers and me, merely a pretext for getting at the inner truth that renders every human life meaningful and interesting. In Lise and Vilhelm’s story, which may prove to be about a great deal of things, nothing is accidental, nor could it be any other way. Most facts are irrelevant, but a few suddenly prove to have surprising significance, like fishing out the precise scrap of fabric from the ragbag that brings the pattern to life.

Today they hauled oﬀ the skip, from which everything of value had been stolen. What remained was useless, broken

Vilhelm’s Room

rubbish, because Vilhelm and Lise never got attached to things, and two people who leave each other for good every day for twenty years never acquire anything new or make any changes. I have even tossed all the photographs to better focus on the pictures on the walls of my heart. Only one have I kept: the photograph of Vilhelm and Lise at the top of Himmelbjerget. We are young and happy, and so obviously in love even the photographer must have been envious. For there is something about any fresh and new beginning that stokes a person’s need to destroy the fragile construction, or at least to bring the bricks into disarray so it ends up crooked and unfinished and no longer catches anyone’s eye. The strangest thing about great love is that it desires to be seen and exhibited, as if everything the happy couple does demands the whole world’s attention. Later on, it is impossible to remember what you said to each other though it was terribly meaningful, and you hardly permitted yourself sleep because sleep meant not speaking. And before you knew it, silence became natural, and words only a kind of fever that occasionally overcame you. And later a menacing emptiness spread between the words, which you turned over in your mouth many times before setting free. The walls moved closer until there was not enough air in the room. You had to say something, anything, and even that became diﬃcult, because the words had vanished into the bitter sadness of our souls.

All that is left (it was our last year in Birkerød) are words such as ‘butcher’, ‘rain’ or ‘boy’, and we rattle them off with dry, flat voices so nothing horrible will happen; to prevent a cruel and irreversible act. Was Vilhelm beautiful? His flawless skin had the colour of heavy cream with a dash of coffee. His cheekbones were high and seemed to pull the corner of his eyes towards his temples. His eyes were grey-brown with a dark ring around the iris, and beneath them, already then, the smoky shadows which

betray a life of suffering and debauchery. I could not fathom how any woman could be happy without knowing him, just as years later I could not fathom how anyone could love him when I no longer did. But they could, or they did, and through their love for him (a demure, sweet flock of little hairdressers, shop assistants, office trainees and factory girls) my own was rekindled and drove away these poppy-flower girls, these faint sketches, these fl imsy beginnings, from his enigmatic heart. My Vilhelm, mine!

To think that it would be Mille of all people who abducted him, this woman to whom I had become so attached I no longer knew who I missed most! Mille, who was neither young, nor beautiful or intelligent, but possessed a cold-heartedness that surpassed even ours when, exhausted by our peculiar passion, we lounged about amusing ourselves at the expense of the poppy-flower girls whose soft petals drifted limply away on the wind. Naturally, things could not continue in this manner, she wrote in her stupid letter. But what was all our suffering compared to the bliss of pleasure? Lise had felt an impotent rage when, six months earlier, she was informed that Vilhelm had become fat. Mille had force-fed him like a goose, stuffed and basted him and buried all his exquisite, dark thoughts under mountains of liver paté. With that, Lise’s Vilhelm was dead and gone, and Mille filled her with disgust. Anger is always directed at the mistress, but once Lise annihilated the whole world, she reconciled with her too. And now, I will tell you my story, only because I must. And, of course, because no one else rightfully can . . .

Mrs Thomsen made a living by renting rooms to respectable young men from good families. At least, that was what she sought in her advertisements. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that such fresh-faced, downy fellows might, at the dawn of time, have resided somewhere in her enormous, filthy ﬂat, but given that the mere sight of her is enough to make my blood run cold, I assume they got out as quickly as they could. Mrs Thomsen always suspected her lodgers of having a hand in every unsolved crime and likely did not sleep for fear of missing an incriminating piece of evidence during her tireless spying on their comings and goings. As for the rest, if they did not leave of their own accord, she eventually evicted them. And before she could even change the sheets, new ones would move in. At least that’s what she told them, in her hoarse, wheezing voice that hobbled behind her thoughts like a stutter before steadying into a kind of monotonous drone when she got to the lurid descriptions of her former lodgers’ unfathomable depravity and the impossible task – for a poor, sick old widow whose best days were behind her – of holding them accountable for their studies. Over time Mrs Thomsen’s lodgers became less reputable and less young, and the only studying they dedicated themselves to was each morning counting up the bedbug bites acquired overnight. The old woman was unmoved. She preempted any complaints by simply throwing them out. Often, the eviction

8 took place with the help of the police, and she was fond of drawing the officers’ attention to the recent spate of unsolved murders, which always occurred during the exact hours the suspicious lodgers had managed to evade her watchful eye. No doubt they would one day find her in bed with a slit throat, she usually added. I’m not disinclined to agree, for if souls such as hers even exist, God grants them a violent and sudden end. But it’s no concern of mine whether Mrs Thomsen ever existed or not. She is a fragment of my dissolved consciousness, floating away on a swell of words, clinging to them and begging for help, just as I am begging the reader for help, yes, begging the reader even to love me, no matter how my face, blurry and ungraspable as if reflected in rippling water, may appear behind other faces far easier to hold on to.

We lived below Mrs Thomsen. Since she was rarely seen outside her flat, I had met her only on three or four occasions over the course of ten years. Each time, she stood very still, sizing me up as though she had sinister intentions and was sorry that the time had not yet come. Her eyes were bloodshot like those of an insomniac, and there was a purity to her ugliness that commanded a shuddering respect, but the look in her eyes was so cold and greedy that it scared me for days after our encounters. Her bedroom was directly above Vilhelm’s room, and I could feel how her vile, slimy thoughts seeped through the ceiling and mingled inextricably with mine. I’m almost certain that she was lurking in the stairwell with a gristly, hairy ear pressed against the door the day Mille appeared in the living room and proclaimed: It’s just awful! He’s never coming back – after twenty-one years! And she fl ung out her arms and her face grew wet as if a button had been pushed to activate a hidden sprinkler system, and I lunged at her to stuff the words back in, along with her jumble of teeth which now came tumbling out, followed by the rest of Mille, skeleton included, until

Vilhelm’s Room

all that remained was a little puddle. Mille’s gentleness; her terrible lack of insight, her duplicity! And the boy, momentarily growing a few inches taller so he could glare through his eyes and use his father’s voice: Get out, this instant! You’ve done enough harm.

Satisfied, the old woman must have hobbled back upstairs. She despised, without exception, all women who were younger and prettier than her, which just about amounted to the entire female half of humanity. She detested the myth of true love and on this fateful day she saw her doubt in its existence confirmed. – And yet, despite this, there was a faint shadow of such love present between the odious woman and the young man, discarded by both life and himself, upon whom she exerted such a morbid force of attraction that even her bad breath became integral to it.

Kurt, who did not really live, nonetheless had a life. When Mrs Thomsen entered his room in the morning, he always pretended to be asleep, but his heart pounded at the thought of what was about to happen. The air around him darkened, and as she limped towards him, chattering incessantly and rustling her ever-present newspapers, his body began to smoulder. He gently touched himself under the deceased Mr Thomsen’s lumpy duvet which reeked so pungently of naphthalene that even the hungriest bedbug preferred starvation to coming anywhere near it. The landlady entertained him with outrageous tales of abominable thrill kills and ghastly fights to the death, which she had seemingly witnessed with the cold, analytic clarity of someone who intended to record her observations for a scientific study. Behind his twitching eyelids, Kurt saw infected guts tumbling out onto the operating table while inebriated doctors attempted in vain to stuﬀ them back in. And with terror-stricken impatience, he awaited the climax when the

patient would awaken mid-surgery and expel their last breath in a gush of blood and agonizing screams.

There were countless variations to this strange oratory performance, which Mrs Thomsen drew out as long as possible, punctuating it with sentimental tabloid tales of beautiful young women bravely facing their impending death by cancer, or an unfortunate family whose child’s brutally maimed body had been found in a nearby rubbish bin the same night one of her lodgers had made himself scarce. But the woman never missed her mark. When her victim became short of breath, and his hands beneath the duvet honed in on a single burning point, she let her shabby blue bathrobe fall to the ﬂoor and threw herself over him with a passion only greater for its mingling with contempt. And finally he opened his bewildered doll’s eyes, which brimmed with a kind of shuddering admiration for the immensity of force in so haggard a body. Afterwards, he promptly fell asleep and because he possessed a genuine lack of interest in other people, he never thought about the life his peculiar lover led when she was out of sight. Nor did he care, just as he never wondered why this victim of hundreds of failed surgeries still had not succumbed to any of them. The only explanation he could think of was that she, like the rest of the world, was a figment of his imagination. It was not something he dwelled on, for he had never felt compelled to analyse his life. Great things were once expected of Kurt, and he had indeed embarked upon a string of unfinishable studies before people had ceased to expect anything of him at all. But Mrs Thomsen, who never allowed anything of value to go to waste, and who, in addition, ascribed to others the same nasty qualities she herself possessed, had long been annoyed that this healthy, usable body should laze about in bed under her roof. One also cannot rule out the possibility that his happiness was a matter close to her heart, especially if it might lead to the unhappiness

Vilhelm’s Room of others. Besides murder and other macabre news, she meticulously pored over the classifieds each morning. So great was her eagerness to read the newspaper before anyone else that she often waited by the door, ready to catch it from the mail slot before it hit the ﬂoor.

This Sunday morning, Kurt was half-asleep in bed as usual while the knowledge of what would soon transpire unfurled deep within him like a fruit that had ripened overnight and was now waiting to be picked. But the blessed, horrifying, highly anticipated moment never arrived because, in her excitement, the old woman burst into the room without having taken the time to slap the customary greasy wig onto her bald head. (She had lost her hair during one of her failed surgeries, and the legal dispute with the doctor in question had yet to be settled.) Kurt stared at her aghast, convinced that the house was on fire, or that a homicidal knife-wielding lodger was at her heels. Then he spotted the newspaper in her trembling hands and suddenly felt very tired and very defenceless. The soft throbbing beneath his fingertips ebbed out, and he scrunched his narrow nostrils in displeasure when she sat down on the edge of his bed and jabbed a dry, stubby nail at a red-framed advert already conspicuous due to its length.

‘It’s her,’ she hissed into his ear. ‘Without a doubt. Read it! This is the chance of a lifetime.’

‘Who?’ Kurt recoiled towards the wall as if hoping it would swallow his frail body (which the landlady only fed meagrely and irregularly), letting him slip in between two layers of wallpaper and consuming him whole in its acrid dampness.

‘The woman downstairs – Lise Mundus – the one with the love poems – I’ve told you often enough how they carry on. I knew it the moment I saw her and the boy return from their summer holiday alone. This last bint must’ve got the better of her and run oﬀ with him, the husband. You can always

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Room

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Vilhelm’s Room