Reffstrup Iron Lung

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916806-05-4
Verlag: Peirene Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

A girl is struck down by polio during the terrifying epidemic of the early 1950s. Paralysed and unable to breathe on her own, she is committed to hospital in Copenhagen and placed in an iron lung. Forty years earlier, near Budapest, a child grows up in an orphanage for boys. The child goes by the name of 'Boy' but is not like the others, as their body seems to transcend the categories of boy or girl. Between these two young people, there is a powerful, enigmatic bond that stretches across time and space.

Kirstine Reffstrup was born in Denmark and lives in Norway. Her first novel, I, Unica, was published to great acclaim in 2016 and was nominated for literary prizes in both Norway and Denmark. Her second novel, Iron Lung, was first published in 2023 and was nominated for the prestigious Politiken Literature Prize. The same year she was awarded the Stig Sæterbakken Memorial Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Reffstrup, Kirstine

Weitere Mitwirkende

Simpson, Hunter

Leseproben

I set the long table in the parlour, my body full of trembling.

My heart beats against the stiff white fabric of my shirt. 

It is the same day, I’ve pulled the night with me through the hours. I’ve painted myself a little moustache with coal from the fireplace. 

The joy of it. 

The fear of it.

The fear, like when the green branches of the acacia tree beat against the windowpane and we think there’s a stranger out in the garden.

I want to look like the other boys. 

Now you’ll see.

It’s almost noon.

Twelve strikes from the grandfather clock. 

I waver like a spiderweb in the breeze.

I wait for the boys.

The long, bright oak table. Twelve newly polished tin spoons and twelve tin plates, one for each of us. A great bowl of salt. A platter with garlands of garlic. A bowl of vinegar and vase of black, coloured roses in the middle of the table. The salt crystals sparkle. The strong, spicy scent of the flowers makes me dizzy.

Maria opens the door soundlessly, cuts a thin slice of light from the garden and the snow, which covers the grass in a thin layer. She hangs shoots of sage over the door frame. Contra vim mortis, non crescit herba in hortis: there grows no herb in the garden stronger than death. Maria cups her hand, wipes the damp and the ashes from the walls with a cloth, tears the spiders from the walls, casts them into the fire, which blazes and makes little pops as they explode.

Maria sits down and holds my hand in hers, her skin so dry, as if turned in flour. Small and slender, the bones loose beneath her skin. Maria is sick, there’s a sickness in her lungs, her breath squeaks, whistles through her lips and turns her cheeks blue, her eyes bulging, blinking. She has a chemical smell, like the pills she swallows, like the house’s noxious stench of soot and garlic.

Consumption, Tara whispers: soon death will come and take you away from us.

Soon, soon, soon, Maria says with a chuckle. But I’m alive yet.

Lunchtime, Tara calls. She rings a little copper bell. I blink, press my cheek to the rose-coloured wallpaper. The walls murmur. The bell rings again. Then, finally, I hear the boys. They swing open the doors, coming in herds, the younger ones from the yellow room and the older ones from the purple one. The drumbeat of twenty-two legs. They gallop in, slender calves, their light and dark voices filling the corridor.

The older boys sleep in the purple room where the white geese live, and when they lock the door at night, my heart beats so wildly that I think it might pound right through my chest. The geese shriek, and the smell of wet mucous membranes and sweat seeps out under the door, a smell of something forbidden, something terrible. The shouts and screams from in there make us, the littler ones, so scared we hide under our blankets.

I lie in the yellow room every night with the other little boys, though I’ll soon be too big and I can already kiss the tops of their heads from above. Everything in there is painted dark yellow: the ceiling and the walls, even the door frames, which sunlight warms in the summertime. Tara says that we’re her light, we young ones, whom the morning sun caresses.

Now the boys are here. I’ve felt alone without them. Shivering, they sit on the sofa and the floor. The younger boys dart around Tara, the elder ones shove each other as if inebriated, shove me so I shrivel like a salted carp and want to hide in a corner until their shouting and raging is exhausted. They button their open shirts with a row of shiny black buttons. Their high, stiff collars reach up to their ears and force their necks straight. The older boys are taller than the sisters, the younger are shorter than me. I do what they do, raise my voice and smooth my trousers. Every day we enact the same ceremony: we bow for the sisters, we shake hands with each other like strangers. I put the napkins on the table, one for each boy, a silver ring around each. The hyacinths on the windowsill eat the dusty air, their noxious blossoms grimacing like heads in a bell jar. Blue and black. The food is ready, Tara calls.

The stew, I skimmed it myself. Fat chunks of meat and onion rings drift on the surface, and the sisters have made kifli, sweet and salty, layer upon layer of yeasty white dough folded into half-moons and placed in the sun to leaven, where they glisten white, strewn with sesame seeds and dead flies. Soon the boys will eat. Soon they will lick the crumbs from their lips, lick my meat stew from their spoons.

Tara gives me the sign, and I say: Take your seats.

The younger boys shout: Never ever.

The elder boys say: You’ll regret it.

We sit around the table and I sink into the boys’ company. Shoulder to shoulder. I become their shadows, their laughter. Their smells of soil and chewing tobacco and smoked meat. Tara circles the table, bending over each one of us, counting us though she knows we’re all there. Twelve. She strokes our heads. Her twelve boys, our high collars crackling with starch and soda. The boys sit in rows according to age, with me in the middle. A straight stalk. Tara’s mouth hangs slightly open, her breath yeasty. We hold out our hands and Tara inspects our fingernails, hand by hand. She has a little knife in her pocket. We grip the tabletop: the trick is to stay very still as she gouges the filth from under our nails.

Our nails grow. 

Dark half-moons. 

Filth, says Tara. 

We file our nails. 

Brittle and bowed.

With our nails we can reach the flies down in the cracks of the floorboards.

With our nails we can scratch each other’s cheeks, flay the skin into thin bands.

Sometimes Tara’s knife slips under our nails, and we scream, suck up the blood that gushes down our hands in stripes.

When Tara is done with our nails, she takes her place at the head of the table. Maria sits at the other end. They clasp their hands and pray to the forest and the soil for protection, and we whisper: Give us fruit and meat. They pray to the house for protection, and we sing: Hold back the dark. Then we lift our knives and butter our bread. The sisters eat off porcelain plates, painted with brown landscapes. But they prefer to look at our faces than at the porcelain. We boys, of whom they are so proud. Look, we have such good appetites, we’re growing strong. We’re getting fat! We grunt, put on a little show for them. Little piglets. We squeal at them and clink our knives on our plates.

Tara rings her bell for the third time, and the hyacinth’s wormy roots reach down to the floor, growing fat like white meat, like blanched, supple tendons as Maria serves the stew, as we gulp down the potent fluid, a row of pulsing muscles and breath and restlessness, silver spoons flashing halfway to our mouths. The boys. And I sit among them. We are twelve straight silhouettes against the light.

When the older boys taste the soup, they shout: Meat!

The younger boys whisper: We hate meat.

Then Tara says: There’s no more milk. Loudly over the table, she says: Was it one of you?

No more milk, and thus no more cream and no more butter.

This is the last butter. 

Save it.

I look down at my plate. 

Has she found me out? 

No, it resounds within me. 

No, it resounds within.

I take a bite of the bread Tara serves, the priceless dark yellow butter, of which there will now be no more, which we must now wait weeks to have again, because the milk has been stolen. I stare at the teeth marks. I beam at the boys with my fat butter-smile. Their hands reach out, their eyes ravenous. Adam’s apples jutting. The boys’ joy at mealtimes, the light in their eyes, the grease on their lips. Their shoulders, their flat chests heaving and falling beneath their scratchy, clean shirts. I speak in a deeper register, like them. I stick out my throat, like them.

Then they notice my moustache, the thread of soot.

The boys laugh and drum their fingers.

Tara sees it too. Tara says: What have you done? She spits and rattles, rubs the skin above my lip.

The boys laugh. I bow my head. 

Nothing.

Silence.

...