Besides, the wench is dead . . .
William Leith
VIRGINIA by Jens Christian Grondahl Canongate, £7.99, pp. 121, ISBN 1841954101 Denmark, 1942. The country is occupied by the Germans. At night, Danes lie in their beds, listening to the drone of Allied aircraft passing overhead. One of these Danes is a 16-year-old girl, evacuated from Copenhagen to a house on the coast. 'She is dead now,' says the narrator, many years later. He himself seems almost dead; this, we realise quite quickly, is a damaged guy. Looking back at his life, he says, 'I could feel as far away as if I saw everything on film even though I was fond of my children and both my wives and in general have been fairly satisfied with my life.'
Fairly satisfied — it doesn't sound like much, does it? Our strange, cold host, who cannot bear to name himself, takes us back to the war. He is 14. The 16-year-old evacuee arrives at his house. There she is — tall, blonde, unknowably gorgeous. He cannot bear to refer to her by name, either. To him, she is a goddess; to her, he is nothing. Unable to help himself, in a trance of infatuation, he creeps up to her bathroom window to spy on her, And he gets lucky. There she is, 'lifting her large, soft breasts gently and intimately to dry underneath them with her towel.'
Or is he so lucky? Perhaps this moment of inarticulate yearning will ruin both these people's lives. Our narrator is obsessed with the girl in a way that is overpowering, but truly hopeless; he is crushed by his feelings. He obsesses over her 'broad shoulders' and 'loose flaxen hair', and 'the large birthmark at the back of one knee'. He tries to overtake her on his bicycle but falls off; she laughs. Later, he sneaks up to her bathroom again. 'Suddenly she bent forward, her breasts hanging heavily for a moment beneath her forward-leaning torso.' But this time the bathroom window slams shut. Has she seen him?
Then we find out why our narrator became so cold and hollow. He describes his adolescent self as he discovers something about the girl — she is having a secret affair with a grounded British airman. The war brought this beautiful creature to the boy's house, and now the war has taken her away again. When he finds Out about the airman, he does something — or, rather, doesn't do something — that he will agonise about for the rest of his life. The girl will disappear. Fifty years later, he will meet someone at her graveside, and another subtle, precisely described series of events will be set in motion.
Grondahl is a classy writer — he doesn't tell you much, so you find yourself straining to understand what motivates his characters. He makes you search through your own emotions; you rack your brains, trying to piece things together. This is a book you can read in the time it takes to watch the Eastenders omnibus. But it will stay with you for a lot longer.
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