A Postcard for Annie

by Ida Jessen

Genres: General Fiction; Short Stories; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Writing with the same narrative generosity, the same belief in the dignity and voice of her characters as Marilynne Robinson, this prize-winning collection of stories follows the inner lives of several women on the brink, or the sidelines, of catastrophe.

From the winner of the Lifetime Award from the Danish Arts Foundation and the 2017 Critics’ Choice Award, Ida Jessen’s A Postcard for Annie traces the tangled emotional lives of women facing moral dilemmas.

A young woman witnesses a terrible accident with unexpected consequences, a mother sits with her unconscious son in a hospital room, a pair of sisters remember their mother’s hands braiding their hair.
 
In seaside tourist villages and in snowy cities, turbulence destabilizes composed lives, whether through outright violence between strangers or habitual domination between loved ones.
 
Jessen fills each story with bracing passages that splash with the living world, only to become concentrated in the unfixed, vacillating matter of a human psyche caught between silence and speech, paralysis and action.

Release date: June 28, 2022

Publisher: Archipelago

Print pages: 180

Sample

In My Hometown
 
In my hometown, in a red-brick premises on the high street, there was a bookstore run by a married couple who lived on the first floor above the shop. When I started school, the Saugmanns’ small and amply stocked bookstore became one of the places to which I drifted whenever I was given any money to spend. The books stood two deep on the shelves and it took an age to pore through the selection and decide. Mr and Mrs Saugmann allowed me to graze in peace without bothering me with questions about what I might be looking for and whether they could help, nor did they ever mention that we were acquainted from elsewhere, I having addressed them in a non-too-distant past according to my mother’s instruction as Uncle Saugmann and Aunt Helle.  
        For it was the case that my parents every year would invite the Saugmanns to spend Christmas with us, and implicitly it was a shame for them, because they never had children. Nonetheless, each year they declined. The Saugmanns didn’t mix with people, and no one in my hometown knew very much at all about their private circumstances. But instead they would come for lunch the day after Boxing Day, together with the pastor, who was unmarried and had a soft, clean-shaven face and wandering, tormented eyes that would eventually fix themselves on some distant point of the dining room at the same time as he would utter an ‘aaaah’, as if now at last he understood. My parents believed him to be gay and that in any case he was an unhappy man to whom one had to be nice. He came from a family of clerics and had been engaged for the sake of his name, but the fact of the matter was that he was incapable of conducting pastoral care in the event of any bereavement, or even of delivering a sermon, and certainly not of guiding the confirmands, whose lessons of instruction would degenerate into sheer mistreatment with the pastor on the receiving end. Besides his ‘aaaah’, he would take no part in the conversation at table, and no sooner had the meal been concluded than he would retire to my father’s study for a snooze before the time came to go home. On the distant waves on which rumours ride, it was washed ashore that he had been a happy youth who had played the banjo as well as strip poker during his time in student halls. It was difficult indeed to comprehend that a person could perform such an about-face.
 
        His tenure in our town concluded in his dismissal, and once the scandal had died down he was forgotten. However, many years later, when one of my upheavals relocated me to Næstved, I saw him in the street, striding dreamily along the pavement on his great, flat feet with a faraway look in his eyes. It seemed like the way a person might walk on the moon. He was white-haired by then and with a striking beard that reached halfway down his chest. It had been almost thirty years since I had seen him, yet I was in no doubt that it was him, nor indeed that he was very, very ill. A whim prompted me to follow him and I saw him let himself into a red-brick building down one of the side streets. His name was among those listed alongside the various doorbells. In his windows hung curtains of dark brown velvet, half-drawn against the light. The panes were grey with grime. It all reminded me of a hamster’s dark habitation.
 
        During the time I lived in the same town I would see him at intervals, and most often he would have a quite absent look on his face and seem eerily transparent, yet there were other days when his countenance would be brighter. Occasionally, I considered making myself known to him, but I wished not to remind him of the time he had spent in my hometown, nor of the declining trajectory of his life, though in actual fact he most likely did not care a hoot about such things.
 
        The hometown of my childhood boasted an array of shops and tradespeople. Besides the Saugmanns’ bookstore there were two butcher’s shops, two baker’s, four grocer’s, a shoe shop, a knitwear shop, a florist’s, a goldsmith’s, a tobacconist’s, an outlet of Tatol, and Mary’s Magazines. There was a paint and wallpaper suppliers where I purchased brick-and-tile wallpaper for the purpose of decorating a shoebox in which to make a pretend baker’s shop; there was a bicycle shop, a timber merchant’s, a petrol station and an electrical retailers. There was Schiødt’s nursery garden, which had a shop as well as its earthy-smelling greenhouses with their long, long hotbeds full of young and vigorously sprouting plants. There was a sweet shop and a garage, and there was Miss Sonne who suffered from a goitre and sewed clothes for people under her bulging eyes. There was a gentleman’s barber who stood outside in his white coat, his eyes scouring the street for customers, which only kept them away. In all, some one thousand inhabitants populated our town, and as a child I would always yearn to leave the place. It seemed to me as if everything had ground to a halt and that no change would ever be possible there. I went about, brooding and biding my time until I was old enough to move away.
 
        It was said of Mrs Saugmann that so good-natured was she that she gave away half the business, and certainly it is true that I received cartons of violet or scented writing paper, the glue of whose envelopes no longer stuck, or little black oilcloth-bound notebooks she brought to light from the upstairs stockroom in packets of twenty, meticulously wrapped in tissue paper. As a child, it was she I preferred to serve me in the shop. She was a small figurine of a woman, delicately built and with an anxious disposition, and it was apparent to everyone that her husband was of rather more optimistic outlook.
 
        We were never invited into their own home in return for my mother’s lunches. They did not go out in the evenings, and I never saw her even once at the grocer’s or the co-op. How on earth did they pass the time in their flat above the shop? No one knew, nor was it ever a topic of discussion, for there was something immaterial about the Saugmanns, and one did not expect the same earthly behaviour of them as one did of others.
 
        When they reached retirement age, the shop closed down. I don’t know if they tried to sell the business, because by that time I had moved away and tended to let news from home go through one ear and out the other. Great green curtains of cellophane were draped in front of the panes inside and the premises transformed into a dead stop on the high street amidst all the other former premises, for of all the many shops that had once existed there, only the co-op, a newsagent’s and a charity shop remained, and that change had occurred while I was fully preoccupied with change of my own.
 
        The Saugmanns began to travel. They visited Rome and Florence and took in Renaissance art, and attended the New Year’s Eve concert at Vienna’s Musikverein. Indeed, they even went to China and walked on top of the Great Wall. Mrs Saugmann was still delicate and fragile, and he quite as optimistic and affable. One encountered them on the pavements of the town, where they told of their travels to the people they met, always arm in arm, always together.
 
        And then the odd thing happened that through my parents they invited me to accompany them on one of their journeys, a trip by train to Bergen and from there on by ship to Trondheim. It was a quite extraordinary gesture, for I was no longer the child they had known, and from them of all people, coming moreover at a point when I had recently completed my unremunerative studies and had descended into doubt about everything. It was an invitation quite exceeding the boundaries that until then had existed between us, one that more than anything else astonished me, and yet I accepted. In fact, I rather wanted to go.
 
        The trip lasted ten days and I could not have imagined better company for anyone whose nerves were as ragged as mine than the Saugmanns. He was the very gentleman, and at last the uncle I had been encouraged to see in him as a child, even inviting me to call him by his first name, Palle. She was sweetness itself, and her wide, clear eyes were as grey as the sea on which we sailed. The two of them made fine, convivial company, and were amusing and scrupulously tactful throughout. They demanded nothing of me and allowed me to keep my secrets to myself, though they preoccupied me so greatly that it did not so much as occur to me that they might have their own to keep. On the whole journey there was but a single untoward incident. In the train compartment returning from Bergen to Copenhagen we sat in the company of an elderly German couple, the man continually pointing out the view and holding forth to his wife on where they were and what they were seeing. They were very amicable and eager to converse with us, but Palle Saugmann refused to offer even a word in reply when they spoke to him, and the air of the compartment soon thickened with resentment. Helle tried to placate him, but to no avail. Eventually, we were compelled to find somewhere else to sit.
 
        We stayed in touch for many years, though still without my being invited into their home. I attended their golden wedding anniversary, lavishly celebrated at a restaurant in the neighbouring town. Among the guests were a number of the former shopkeepers who in the interim had moved to other places, as well as friends I had no idea even existed. The celebration concluded with dancing, and when Palle Saugmann inclined to me we held the floor to It’s Now or Never.
 
        ‘Yes!’ he enthused on hearing the words. ‘That’s it exactly. That’s how I got so old.’
 
        I thought he meant that he had always seized a chance if one happened to come along, as most people perhaps would have boasted. But Palle Saugmann was on quite a different tangent. ‘I never took the plunge. That’s why! I never dared to venture!’
 
        It was the last time I would be in their company for five years, but then one evening in winter I received a phone call from my mother. She told me that Helle Saugmann had died quite suddenly and that she was being laid to rest two days later. She asked if I could attend.
 
        She picked me up at the station and held my arm for support as we walked along the replanned streets, past timeworn, partially repaired buildings, to the centre of town. As we were about to go through the gate of the churchyard, she paused.
 
        ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ she said. ‘Don’t be surprised to see a lady in the church bearing a remarkable resemblance to Helle Saugmann. I assume she’ll be seated next to Palle.’ I was rather taken aback to hear her refer to him so familiarly, for she had never to my knowledge done so before, but I let it pass. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
 
        ‘Helle has a daughter.’
 
        ‘What?’
 
        ‘She’s over sixty, with children of her own, and grandchildren too. Helle’s great-grandchildren are inside.’
 
        ‘How long have you known?’
 
        ‘I found out last night,’ my mother said.
 
        ‘And how long have they known?’ I asked.
 
        ‘Always, I should hope,’ my mother said with a little smile.
 
        ‘You know what I mean.’
 
        ‘Do I?’
 
        ‘I mean, how long have they known each other?’
 
        ‘Not that long, as far as I know. Ten or fifteen years perhaps.’ Our exchange ended there, for by then we had reached the church door where some of the other mourners were filing through, and we followed them inside.
 
        Palle had become a very old man and I hesitated to kiss his paper-thin cheek, electing instead to shake his and Helle’s daughter’s hands. What my mother had said was true: she was the spitting image of her mother. The way she turned her head was exactly as Helle would have done. She smiled Helle’s smile, her eyes were as clear as Helle’s, even her handshake felt like Helle’s, and there was a cautiousness between her and Palle which perhaps too was Helle’s, but perhaps mostly their own. It was as if everyone was comforted by her presence.
 
        The funeral service was well attended and the floral tributes stretched back down the aisle. No murmuring voices were heard, no whispers in the pews, and no one craned to see the unknown daughter with progeny. Not a hint of sensation-mongering marred the occasion. With the exception of myself and Helle’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all were elderly, and I assume that everyone present realised and accepted that a lifetime of keeping such a matter quiet perhaps cannot readily be explained.
 
        A fête was once held in my hometown. It happened only the once, and it was the time just before all the shops disappeared. The high street was closed off and a trellis table erected along its length where people could sit with coffee and cake, and a football match was arranged between members of the retailers’ association. Almost everyone was in attendance, apart from Miss Sonne who remained indoors behind her curtainless windows. The barber had swapped his white coat for a windcheater. Helle Saugmann was the graceful, reedy, gently swaying referee, equipped with a yellow whistle from which she was unable to produce any other sound than the feeblest warble. Until the moment came for her to signal the end of the match, at which point the yellow whistle sounded shrilly out over the street and all the rooftops.
 
        ‘Well, I’ll be damned, Helle,’ the gardener Schiødt exclaimed. ‘You pulled a bloody fast one on us there.’