Ane,” she said, giggling again and shoving Torben who shoved her back.
Inside the gallery the rest of the students were walking around and experiencing the installation. Willum had created three universes that he’d taken from Björk songs, a red space, a blue one, and a white, each equipped with diverse effects, furniture, and some curtains.
Ane gave Rose a dirty look.
“So, aren’t you going in to see the exhibit?” she asked.
Rose didn’t hear her, but kept fooling around with Torben and the others.
Willum said our task during the trip was to create a book. The actual content could be whatever we wanted, but the point was to translate an art project onto the books’ pages, just like he’d translated Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” to the show’s white space and her “Come to Me” to the red.
That evening Willum invited two of his friends, an artist couple, to the apartment. The woman, her name was Leise, had done several art books. She showed us her latest, a print series that more or less gave the identical impression of being somewhat dark, somewhat moist, somewhat hairy, somewhat bulbous. The book was entitled Durch. Leise explained that the impressions had been taken the moment a baby emerged from its mother’s womb. She’d attended twenty-five births, and the instant the baby bubbled forth from between its laboring mother’s legs, Leise had pressed the paper to its bloody cranium.
Torben, who was well plied with Weißbier by that time, bent over and inspected the book.
“Does it smell?” he asked.
His nostrils vibrated. Rose snatched the book from his hands and tossed it onto the sofa. He headed for the bathroom and Rose followed.
After Leise and her husband left, Willum and some of the others sat in a circle around a candle on the floor. Outside was blue black. A tall girl lay with her arms hanging out the terrace doors.
Suddenly, someone was shouting: “It’s Torben, it’s Torben.”
Rose pointed out the slanting roof window and we took turns peering out. There on the neighboring roofline a figure was hunched against the sky. It was crawling along the roof’s long ridge.
“No fucking way, that can’t be Torben,” Ole Willum said. “How the hell did he even get up there?”
“He crawled out one of the attic windows,” Rose shouted.
She forced her way to the window and opened it.
“Torben! Come back in! Right now! You’re going to fucking fall from way up there! You’re drunk!”
The shadow that was Torben continued along the roofline until it reached a point directly above a window bay and stretched itself to full Torben height. Abruptly, it slid out and down, landing on the bay. Rose shrieked and raced through the attic to the window out of which Torben had first disappeared, flailing and kicking to get her shoes off, and was on her way out when Willum intervened.
“I’d never actually tell anybody! I’d never do that! I was just talking!” she yelled to Torben.
Torben was slumped against the bay window. People on the floors below were hanging out of their windows, some hollered that they’d call the police if it didn’t quiet down. Willum shouted back that it was all under control, just some performance art.
Two hours later Torben was back. Rose had finally persuaded him to crawl in and climb onto the sofa with her. She lay there with a beer. After announcing that he wasn’t taking responsibility for someone getting hurt, especially not while they were plastered, Willum went home. Torben sat nodding with a cup of coffee in his hand, and Rose fell asleep on the couch. The others went to bed. Ane and I had planned to sleep on the floor next to the doors facing the river, where it glistened, but Ane wanted to help Torben climb into his sleeping bag first.
The next day Torben was up first, he poured coffee into two vases. Rose was still asleep in her clothes on the couch. Ane wanted to head out immediately. She was going to do something with animals in her book and had bought herself a weekly zoo pass. Before I’d even finished brushing my teeth, she’d left, and she’d taken her sleeping bag with her. Rose woke up and called for Torben, but he was already gone. He’d taken both his sleeping bag and his backpack.
Rose popped open the last beer and lay back down.
“Fuck, he’s not too bright,” she said. “He has no idea what he’s doing when he’s drunk. One time he almost jumped from his workshop at the school.”
“I thought he was afraid of heights,” observed the tall girl who hadn’t started on her book yet.
“I have no fucking clue what his deal is,” Rose said. “But anyway, he can’t control himself for shit. Did he say where he was going?”
I packed my bag with a camera, some India ink, and a pad of paper. The only thing that came to mind when I thought of my book’s pages were bloody cunts and bloody craniums. That’s the exact project that I wanted to create. Unfortunately, my ink was way too blue. I made a mass of doodles, sheer nonsense.
That evening Willum asked how our first day in Berlin went. Rose said that Berlin was boring, and she thought she could work at home as well as here.
“So work here,” Willum said.
Rose snorted and lit a cigarette, apparently unconcerned that we’d all agreed to smoke only in the kitchen.
It got dark and still Ane wasn’t home. Rose lay on the couch with a cigarette stub hanging from the corner of her mouth. Torben wasn’t back either.
“Wake me up when he gets here,” Rose said and fell asleep.
On the water the sky sailed past in gleaming patches.
Ane finally turned up on the third day. Torben, too.
“We were in the Tiergarten,” she said.
Torben flipped through the pages that would eventually make a book.
“Show them to Justine,” Ane said.
Rose, who’d decided her book would just be an ash tray, lit a cigarette and stubbed the previous one out on a piece of paper.
Torben handed me a pile of drawings.
“Assholes,” he said.
“And eyes,” Ane added.
They were done in pen, hairy, wrinkled, protruding wreaths.
“Gross,” Rose said, standing up from the couch and leaving.
Willum flipped through the pages.
“What the hell’s wrong with her?” he said. “These are really great. Just stylized assholes.”
“And eyes,” Ane added.
She collected the sheets and tied a string around them, readying them to be glued and covered.
“Can I see what you did?” she asked.
“I
