Revolution

Book 0: The Africa Trilogy

by Jakob Ejersbo, Mette Petersen, Mette Petersen

Genres: Coming of Age; Short Stories

Synopsis

Revolution is a collection of eleven short stories that act as a vital bridge between the novels Exile and Liberty. But it is also so much more than that. Ejersbo had a remarkable and unaffected talent for getting inside the heads of his characters: Moses, a worker in a Tanzanite mine who lives in hope of striking it rich; Sofie, a Greenlander who joins a French conman on his trip around the world; Rachel, who tries to make a life for herself in a city where everyone sees her as a whore in waiting. You feel that Ejerbso could have written from the heart of every person living in Tanzania; and that you could go on reading them forever.

Release date: August 30, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 310

Sample

It’s all in my horoscope: I’m going to hate Danish hippies, fall head over heels in love with a French fakir, be Agent 007 in Morocco, starve in Sudan, smuggle gold in my cunt, be robbed by Idi Amin and carry six different kinds of worm around in my intestine, the sixth of which is very special indeed.

My name is Sofie Naasunnguaq Petersen and I was born in Upernavik, northern Greenland, in 1955. My mum is a Greenlander and my dad is Danish. We live as Danes do and speak Danish at home. Our house is a good one – it’s got central heating and electricity and several rooms. Greenlanders live in small wooden houses built especially for them. They all live in one room and everyone sleeps in the same bed, and they have an unbelievable number of children. Lots of people live truly execrable lives. Their alcohol consumption is staggering. There’s no shortage of poverty and misery. But we’re the upper class. My dad oversees all the utilities in our town: electricity and water plants, and the shipping yard and stone quarry. He’s got a lot of people under him, and they report to work at random intervals. And then there are the other Danes – the ones that make our community work: the doctor, the teachers, the postmaster. The Greenlanders are almost all of them whalers and sealers, nomadic people with nowhere to go. They sew kayaks and hunt seals.

My mother has a lot of Greenlandic friends, and they’re forever popping round. But they always sit in the kitchen, because they don’t like it in our sitting room. Not that there’s anything fancy about it – we just have an ordinary sitting room where we sit and snuggle on the sofa, listening to the radio. But when there are Greenlanders here, they always sit in the kitchen and have Greenlandic food. My dad doesn’t want Greenlandic food in the sitting room – he says it stinks to high heaven – it smells of whale oil. We kids have Greenlandic food as well – my mum makes it for us. My dad is an avid hunter and fishes in his spare time. He’s a boy scout if there ever was one. He catches wild birds. He once caught a seal that my mum then cleaned on the kitchen floor. But he won’t eat blubber.

I don’t speak any Greenlandic. At first I pick up a little, but by the time I start school that’s already stopped. The Greenlandic children speak enough Danish to allow us to play. When the grown-ups start speaking fast in Greenlandic, I understand precisely nothing at all. I think I do though, and then when I answer a question they laugh at me because I’m on about something different altogether. So in the end I stop trying, and my dad and I get even closer.

The all-Danish families have nothing to do with the Greenlanders after working hours. The Danes and the Greenlanders never visit each other’s houses. But many of the Danes have a kifak – a Greenlandic daily – who comes round to scrub the floors and do the washing and that sort of heavy-duty housework.

I start school in 1962. The school has a couple of Greenlandic teachers, but we are all taught in Danish. All the other teachers are from Denmark. I’m in the all-Danish class – we are taught in one classroom, regardless of our age or year. The Greenlandic children are taught separately – and teaching them takes forever because they don’t speak much Danish. It’s not till Year Four that the Danish and Greenlandic children are taught together. I don’t do well at school. I daydream. I sit there and stare out of the window. My dad thinks that teachers are spawn of the devil. My mum only went to school for four years. How is an education going to be of any use to a daughter of hers? After all, she’s done alright for herself. As long as someone is going to marry us, what’s the problem?

I’ve got a friend called Uvalu who comes round to play in the afternoons. One day my dad swings by in the afternoon. Normally he doesn’t come home until quite late – right before dinner. He opens the door to my room and sees Uvalu.

“Err … hello,” he says. I can see the jolt he gives. It makes me nervous; what’s going on?

“Hello, Mr Petersen,” Uvalu says.

“Hi, Dad,” I say.

“You two girls have fun now,” he says and smiles, closing the door. What did we do? Later we go outside to play, and I forget about it until that night when we’ve had dinner and my dad is sitting on the sofa and says:

“Sofie – come here for a sec.” I go over and sit down next to him, and he puts his arm around my shoulder. “Sofie, you mustn’t bring the Greenlandic children home,” he says.

But I am a Greenlander, because of my mum.

“Why not?” I ask.

“It’s not good for them to have to see how nice our house is,” he says. “It’ll upset them.”

“Why will it upset them?” I ask.

“Because we have such a nice home, and they live in such small, uncomfortable houses,” my dad says. I don’t say anything, but I think it’s odd. Maybe he doesn’t think they’re nice enough.

My parents met on board a ship in 1950 when my dad was on his way to Greenland. There was a piano on board, and my dad had brought his guitar. My mum played the piano. Isn’t music the food of love? She had been in Denmark training to be a bookbinder, and now she was on her way home to see her family. She was apprenticed to someone who bound teeny-weeny Hans Christian Andersen books, one fairy tale per book. She was never to work as a bookbinder. There’s no such thing as bookbinding in Greenland. They were married and had my two big sisters, and then they had me.

It says something about how Greenlandic my mum is that neither of her parents speak anything but Greenlandic. But there was a Norwegian in my granddad’s family and a German in my granny’s. My mother’s family can trace Danish blood back to 1775. And actually my granddad has blue eyes, and my granny has curly hair – Greenlanders don’t, so there has to have been quite a bit of white blood in the family.

When my mum was a girl, her dad was a catechist – a curate – and then he was a teacher. He was actually paid in money. That was when most people only had whatever they caught and whatever money they could make from selling what they had caught, which never amounted to much. So you could say that my mum was from an affluent family, even though it was a family of sixteen children – my granddad had four children from his previous marriage and he went on to have twelve children with my granny. They’re very old now. They still live in the little grey house behind the old church in Nuuk – sitting room, kitchen and two bedrooms upstairs.

My granddad says that my mum was always upwardly mobile. She most certainly wasn’t going to be an impoverished Greenlander with an alcoholic husband. And she really does call the shots at home. We have to sit nicely with our knees together and become good housewives – at least my older sisters do. I get off a lot easier, because I’m the youngest and the apple of my dad’s eye. My older sisters have jobs to do around the house, including some of the heavier work. They have to help out with the washing, which is done by hand in great wooden tubs, and all our clothes must be wrung by hand. But then my mum gets a wringing machine and a washing machine – the first in our village, because, after all, my dad has been trained as a machinist and he is the manager of the town’s electricity plant and knows about technical stuff.

In 1964 we move to Holsteinsborg on Greenland’s west coast. My parents play in a dance band and there is a dance every Friday and Saturday in the town hall, where there is a piano. I’m not old enough to go, but my sisters take me and let me watch through the window. The room is packed. My mum and dad play polka on guitar and piano, and a Danish man plays the drums, and everyone is dancing and laughing. As we walk home, we hear a man being sick. My sisters just keep walking.

“We have to help him – he’s not well,” I say. They laugh, and there are dogs running towards the sound.

“He’s just drunk,” my oldest sister says. “Now the dogs are going to run over and eat his sick.”

We have a piano at home as well, and the band comes over for practice; my mum and dad and some Danish men who know how to play the drums and the bass. My oldest sister gets to sing “The Girl from Ipanema” with them.

Every summer the town’s population is doubled by the builders from Denmark who come to slap up five blocks of flats in no time. Tiny wooden terraces for the Greenlanders to move in to. None of the Greenlanders are involved in construction. The Danes work in shifts around the clock, because it’s light all the time, so it’s all hands on deck while the ground is unfrozen. Most of the men are single. On the weekend they go mad. The builders drink like sponges and behave like wild beasts. And the Greenlandic girls throng around them, because the builders have money and men with money means free drinks. The girls are going to get laid, and then they can have a warm bed to sleep in and maybe even a free meal afterwards. There are the prefab girls and the harbour girls. The young men from town are ticked off, which means that Saturday-night dances are full of fights. Some of the Danish men stay on for years and marry the girls, or they take their missus back to Denmark. Those are the decent ones. The others, and that’s most of them, simply get the girls up the duff and leave town.

I long for civilization. Every year some of the older boys are sent off to technical schools in Denmark and they return two years later. They’re the most exciting thing – flashy modern clothes and new haircuts. They move in a different way, speak in a different way and have a new side to them which gives them an air of something altogether different. You don’t recognize them straight off. I’m standing with my classmate Malo, watching them at a distance.

“I think that one’s Anton,” Malo says.

“Anton? Nooo, really?” I say.

“I’m not sure,” Malo says.

“He is one hot number,” I say.

“Yes,” Malo says. And we are afraid to even speak to the guy, that’s how hot he is.

I see a lot of pictures in my mum’s magazines, the ones she has sent up every week from Denmark – pictures of hippies, blokes with long hair, flower children. Something new is coming. I want to be a part of it. The Anton effect wears off. The new clothes get less new with time, and some of it is stolen by family members, and then he’s back to being execrable and worn again.

I’ve finished Year Six in Holsteinsborg. I’m twelve years old, and we sail to Denmark for a six-month holiday before my dad starts his next contract. We stay with my dad’s sister and in a rented holiday cottage. It’s my thirteenth birthday – they take me to Sejrgårdskolen in Tølløse just a day or two before they’re due to fly back.

“Bye for now,” I tell them and give a quick wave. Now’s my time to shine. I’m diving into my new life head first. But nothing’s prepared me for the Danes.

“My, my, you must have had all the blubber you could eat back in your settlement,” one of the older pupils tells me, pinching my cheek, laughing. I get flustered and frightened. I go to the toilet and cry, staring in the mirror. I’m a half-Greenlander with plump cheeks and straight black hair. But I speak Danish and have lived like a Dane in Greenland. Only here, Danish is somehow foreign and different. Danes are harsh with each other. My grandmother has told me that the first Greenlanders who came to Denmark in the 1700s died from the shock. There are other half-Greenlanders at the school – we’re all outsiders. I try to connect with a Danish girl.

“You smell of piss,” she says.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“You Greenlander-slags all wash your hair in piss – you’re just rank.” She turns her back on me and walks off. I’ve never heard anything like it.

The only thing I recognize at school is the piano in the assembly hall, so for the first year I go over and play it whenever I get the chance. It’s my way of hiding in plain sight.

After some time I come out of isolation. I’ve come up with a way of defending myself – extreme arrogance: I carry myself with dignity – coldness, my back as straight as a rod, my head held high. Friendly and to the point, but aloof. Don’t get clever with me. Don’t even think about it.

Luckily there are lots of ex-pats at school – their parents are ambassadors in countries like India and Malaysia, and there are several D.A.N.I.D.A. children whose parents are working in Africa on various aid projects. We’ve got something in common because we’ve grown up outside Denmark even though we’re really Danish. Most of the pupils come from Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, but especially from the well-to-do areas north of the capital. Their parents are company directors with little or no time for kids: Daddy’s busy with his career, and Mummy’s got a facial mask slapped on and is having her nails done – that is, if she’s not out shopping. We don’t talk about our parents, but when the others return from weekends with their folks, they have loads of new clothes, and their parents drive flashy cars and look like the right sort of people.

In the summer I fly home to visit, and suddenly it’s me who’s interesting and strange. I stuff myself with my mum’s cooking and get drunk with my old friends in front of the bonfires we light at night. I lose my virginity to Anton in a field of summer flowers.

After four years at the boarding school in Tølløse I’ve finished my final exams and am moving to Copenhagen; my dad has got me a job at the Greenland Office as a trainee clerical assistant, starting in January 1973. I’m going to work at the Greenland Technical Organization, which is a subdivision of the Greenland Office on Hauser Plads, just round the corner from Kultorvet.

The average age at the Greenland Office is sixty, and I’m the only trainee. I don’t make any friends at work, but they’re as sweet as anything. A great bunch. O.K., to be honest there are women in the office who are terrible prudes – native Danes who’ve never been to Greenland. But almost everyone else is an old hand who has worked on Greenland for years – they’re as tolerant as can be and crack jokes all the time, so the atmosphere is really good. But there aren’t any Greenlanders – I’m as close as it gets to that.

I’m a little hippie and swan about in flowery dresses with my John Lennon glasses and wooden-soled boots, but it’s fine – there’s no strict dress code at the Greenland Office. I take evening classes at a commercial school while I work my way through the different departments and offices at the Ministry: the typing pool, the copy room, mail room, archive and accounts, where I don’t do too well. I learn to type and become quite good at being organized and an ace at prepping the mail. I even get a short period on the telex, sitting and writing directly to Greenland.

I am eighteen years old and in Copenhagen where I don’t know a living soul. A lot of the people I met at boarding school were expats and have moved back to the places where their parents live, and a few have gone on to Herlufsholm. But I’m not doing gymnasiet, because I have no interest whatsoever in academic education; I despise it.

My parents haven’t prepared me for life or done anything to help me get ahead. My dad got me the trainee job and from there on I’m on my own. Luckily one of the former pupils from the boarding school has told me you have to read the classified ads when you’re looking for a room, because obviously I have no idea how to do these things. And I don’t want to ask my big sisters. The older one has married a bricklayer and is planning to have children and fry meatballs all day. And the younger never has any time for me, so I’ve given up on her – she’s gone all snooty and thinks that my being a hippie is reprehensible.

The first room I apply for is in a large flat on Frederiksberg. I arrive at the door, which is opened by a cross-looking old hag. She looks at me with blatant suspicion.

“Now then, where are you from?” she asks.

“Me? I’m a Dane from Tølløse,” I say. Which, I suppose, I sort of am, even though my mother is a Greenlander. But during the first month I get several letters from Greenland, and that makes the crone even more suspicious.

“Are you a Greenlander?” she asks.

“No, but my parents both work on Greenland,” I say. A couple of days later there’s a knock on my door. I open.

“I want you out by the end of the month,” the crone says.

“Why?” I ask.

“You don’t tidy the kitchen when you’ve used it,” she says.

“I’ll do better, I promise,” I say.

“And, you’re a liar,” she says. “That’s what you’re all like.”

“What do you mean?”

“You told me you were Danish. But you look funny. You’re not a proper Dane.”

“So what if I’m not?” I ask.

“I don’t want you here. I want you out by the end of the month,” she says and leaves. Mercifully, by then I’ve found out how it’s done. I go to Use It at Huset in Magstræde, where they’ve got a locations office, and they get me another room on Frederiksberg, in an attic under the roof of the oldest house in the area. It’s got central heating – there’s a giant radiator there. But the room is just wooden boards, and the wind whips in through every crack. I get a terrible cold. And I can’t be bothered to cook. I never learned how at home, and at long last I can decide when I want to eat – I’ve never been that hot on food. It’s all the time and then some. And then I sort of forget, or I just don’t bother, and at one point I simply collapse because I haven’t eaten for so long, and I’m almost in shock because I’m so lonely. It’s utter, wretched misery those first six months in Copenhagen. When I’m not at work, I just sleep.

One day it’s snowing, and I suddenly think of my oldest sister in Brønshøj – that I really want to see her. I take the bus there, and the first thing she tells me is that I can get myself a fella at Søpavillionen or Damhuskroen.

“That’s what I did – there’s no shortage of builders,” she says.

“Who says I want to go out with a builder?” I say.

“I’m just trying to help,” she says. I drain my coffee cup, say goodbye and go and put my coat on. As I walk out of the drive, I meet her bricklayer.

“Have you got yourself a boyfriend yet?” he asks straight off. Apparently that’s the plan.

“No,” I say.

“I know an electrician who might be interested in a little hippie-chick like yourself.”

“Oh,” I say.

“That electrician … he used to work in Greenland,” the bricklayer says. “He likes Greenlandic girls.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Are you as good a cook as your sister?” he asks.

“I don’t cook at all,” I say.

“Oh,” he says.

“Ta-ta,” I say and stomp off through the snow.

Then suddenly spring is upon us, and the city opens its arms to me. I have been trudging along like a zombie around the office all winter and have slept so much you wouldn’t believe it. Now I stroll along Strøget. There are all sorts of goings-on, with street vendors, illusionists and buskers. I’m staring at one man’s guitar

“You like my guitar?” he asks, and I say yes and ask if I can have a try, surprising him by playing a Danish folksong my dad taught me to play.

“Dulcimer Chuck from San Francisco,” he says, shaking my hand.

“Sofie from Greenland,” I say. He’s also got a four-stringed instrument from the Appalachians called a dulcimer. We head down to Huset, and later we go to Sofies Kælder to drink beer and chat, and the next day we meet again, and not long after we’re in my bed.

Chuck tells me he grew up in West Tennessee. He’s of Georgian decent and has an eighth indigenous blood, because his great-grandfather was a horse thief and married a Cherokee woman.

I tell him I’m a Greenlander mixed with whalers, sailors, explorers, merchants and missionaries. And he doesn’t act funny when I tell him.

“Blood travels the world to find new blood to mix with,” Chuck says and grabs on to me. And then we’re shagging again. It’s fantastic.

Through Chuck I get to know all the other buskers. Most of them are foreigners: Americans, French, Germans, Italians and all sorts of others. It cheers me up no end. I have friends again. It’s fun, hippie-homely. I buy a second-hand guitar and start remembering the songs my dad taught me as a child. My relationship with Chuck is soon over, but we’re still friends, and now at least I’ve got started and there are loads of hippies, and of course loads of Danes as well. There’s nothing homely about that, however. The Danish hippies give me the greatest disappointment of my life. I have dreamt of meeting them ever since I saw the first pictures of flower children in my mum’s magazines in Greenland. At school I comforted myself with the thought that only the petit-bourgeois brats were stupid and prejudiced. But the hippies are exactly the same. I can be sitting at the bar in Sofies Kælder, chatting away with a Danish hippie in his Afghan fur coat and homemade Icelandic sweater, plenty of jewellery and hair down to here. For hours we can be talking, totally open-minded. Intimacy is flowering; we both believe in Utopia, no borders and the free mixing of races, humanity as one big happy family building a big happy world together – where everyone is equal and equally happy. The bloke will have his hand on my thigh and he’ll be leaning forwards:

“Where are you from, Sofie?” he’ll whisper.

“Upernavik,” I’ll whisper back. “Greenland.” And that’ll be the end of it. The tree-hugger will turn his back on me and chat to someone else.

“Hey there,” I’ll say. No reaction. “What happened?” I’ll say. “We were just talking.” And he’ll get up and leave. That bloody hurts. Greenlanders have a reputation for being drunks, and the women are flee-ridden, dirty whores. I can feel tears stinging in my eyes, so I’ll hurry outside and walk home with my hands balled into fists. All the hippies attend university and are sickos. They’re mad about India, and spirituality, and African independence, and cross-cultural whatnot, and isn’t it just frightful how the negroes were treated in the colonial times, and all sorts of bollocks. The hippies lap it up unreservedly, but in their heads they still have a ruthless opinion of Greenlanders. They can’t see that there’s a human being inside me when I come from Greenland.

I go over and talk to Chuck.

“If I tell them I’m from Greenland, the Danes just sit there, staring at me whenever I lift a beer bottle as if they think I am going to spew curses, syphilis and sick.”

Chuck shakes his head.

“The hippies think they’ve shed all their middle-class values. But underneath the surface they still believe everything their parents taught them: they’re as prissy and puritan as hell. All hippies talk of new ideas – how they’d like things to be. But they can’t live it. They don’t know how to get started. They’re middle class, middle-of-the-road to their core.”

“But why do the hippies hate me just because I’m from Greenland?” I ask.

“They’re the same with the Native Americans in the States,” he says. “The hippies wear native get-ups even though they hate the Native Americans.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. Chuck laughs:

“The hippies feel that the Native Americans are born real – in harmony with Mother Nature – while the hippies themselves are just trying to become real. And deep down they know they don’t stand a chance because they’re so irreparably corrupted by their middle-class backgrounds.”

Chuck and me get it together for old time’s sake, but he’s seeing someone else, so I keep going to Sofie Kælder. But it keeps happening. Damned Danes. I’m from the colony, and apparently the colonial overlord needs to perceive me as second-class human because that shields him from perceiving himself as an abuser.

The hypocrisy of Danish hippies disgusts me so much that I start to visit ordinary pubs when I want a beer. But the builders really aren’t any better. Kurt, a drunken carpenter, starts flirting with me, but the result is the same when I tell him where I was born:

“You’re a Greenlander?” he says.

“Yes. Is that a problem?” I ask.

“Niggers the lot of you,” he says.

“Why would you say that?” his mate who has been eyeing me up asks him.

“I’ve worked there, remember?” Kurt says. “It’s rubbish.”

“But you hooked up with a Greenlander-girl, didn’t you?” his mate asks.

“The girls know how to fuck, I’ll give them that. And they’re keen. Just give them a couple of pints and they’ll shag you silly. And they’ll shag any foreigner who drops by to get some fresh blood into their inbred tribe,” Kurt says. “But you’ve got to be careful or they’ll give you the clap.”

“That’s no way to talk about people,” his mate says, casting a shy look at me.

“I’m not making it up. It’s a fact. It’s rotten. They’re completely clueless. They drink. They don’t understand the concept of keeping appointments, and they know bugger all about anything whatever. All the things that matter in Greenland are done by Danes who have been trained in Denmark, because otherwise Greenland would just fall apart. Mooching is the only thing they do well. It’s our tax money paying for it all. We don’t get anything in return. You can’t get Greenlanders into the system. They don’t want it. They just want to fanny about being Greenlanders.”

“But still, you’re going back next summer, aren’t you?” his mate says.

“Yes,” Kurt says. “Yes. I’m going. The money’s good.”

They just don’t get it. Greenland is a sealer–whaler society. The climate is beastly. It’s nigh on impossible to get around the country, and it’s unbelievably hard to live there. It’s primitive to be sure, of course it is. All those Danes with shit for brains have 1500 years of development that Greenland hasn’t had. If we had, we bloody well wouldn’t have let the colonialists in, would we?

Soon I start sorting people into groups: the ones who can handle the fact that I come from Greenland and the ones who can’t: the Danes. Foreigners don’t have screwed-up preconceptions of Greenland, so to them I’m just another foreigner.

Walking down Strøget one day I meet a bloke called Gene who has a country band, and I make friends with his girlfriend, Dorthe; my first Danish friend in Copenhagen. Dorthe is a 29-year-old seamstress – that’s more than ten years older than me, and I think she’s ancient. To her I’m an innocent – even though I may not be as innocent as all that – who comes to visit a bit too often in their Fredericiagade flat. But she’s kind to me and teaches me how to knit, and sew, and crochet. I start going out with a busker, and when he leaves I start seeing another busker.

Everyone is teaching everyone else songs. There are always a couple of guitars on the go when people meet. Soon I am on Strøget myself, passing round the hat, and before long I’m even playing.

The streets are full of people of only one colour: dishwater blond. There are a few immigrants from Turkey, but you never see them walking about anywhere. There aren’t any negroes in Copenhagen, unless you go to jazz concerts.

“It’s just terrible,” Dorthe says. She is reading some books about the Danish slave trade between the Danish colonies in Guinea and the Danish West Indies in the years 1673–1803 – tens of thousands of negroes were shipped to the islands for slave labour on sugarcane plantations. But Denmark sold the islands to the U.S. in 1917. “The islands are full of black people,” Dorthe says. “Imagine if we had kept them. Then there would have been loads of black Danes. How great would that have been!” She’s dying to shag a black man.

Our gang listens to an insane amount of music. We busk on Strøget, and I get on stage with them when Gene’s country band is playing. There are parties every day of the week. And then I’m off to the office – often straight from the pub. And I don’t have access to a bathroom and don’t often get to the public baths; mostly I just manage to give myself a bit of a splash with some water from a bucket in my windswept room. So eeeeew … I’m sure sorting mail with me in the Greenland Office is great fun!

A bunch of us are meeting at Gene and Dorthe’s. There are a few of the band members and their girlfriends and some other musicians and buskers and their friends. There’s probably ten or fifteen of us who meet up at weekends and a few times during the week. One evening, when we’re together and have had a bite to eat, we’re sitting there, smoking and drinking, having an all-round good time. We always speak English when we’re together because everyone understands that. Often there’ll be someone who isn’t a regular member of the group – a guest or visitor. And tonight there’s a bloke who looks quite unlike the rest of us. We’re all hippies after all; the guys have hair as long as the girls’ and are really hip. It’s changed now from flower-power get-ups to jeans and denim. But this bloke is sitting in gabardine woven slacks and a slimline shirt with a huge collar, and enormous sideburns and a moustache – yuck! He’s a proper porn stud; gold chain around his neck with a lion’s claw pendant and gold rings on hi