Anyone, glancing up momentarily from their smørrebrød platters or seasonal mead cocktails, could be forgiven for assuming that the couple cradled together in the bay window is newlywed. Something about the tip of their heads, the rhyme of their postures, their profiles ambered in the resinous twilight.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, since their paths first crossed at the Museum of Natural History, months ago, Axel had led his tour groups through the corridor of Victorian dollhouses linking the galleries of Ice Age mastodons and Viking runestones. Hilda always appreciated the few syllables he spared for the exquisite replicas of aristocratic mansions; most docents skipped them altogether, so any mention counted as ample. She was reassured that he could find something to say about them, even if it was a pretext for exchanging shy, apologetic smiles with the strange foreign girl always curled up on the recessed bench with a Danish dictionary and notebook. The houses were not too mere to matter, though they had served mostly as status symbols: domestic ornaments, in some cases, or playthings for little scions.
At closing time this evening, under the cupola leading to the exit, he had finally addressed Hilda, in a lettuce-crisp accent, with a question whose light air of rehearsal entirely disarmed her: “How would you feel about grabbing a drink?”
She had pressed her lips together as if in deliberation. “Why not?”
So here they are in this too-hipster-for-its-own-good bar, snifters of chilled aquavit nestled in their palms. She is reminded of the quickening effect that hard liquor has on her pulse. She has not tasted the scorch of it since before Otto’s conception. Axel looks at her in charmed bemusement. “Your face,” he laughs. “Looks like you’re out of practice.”
“To say the least,” she sighs.
In Copenhagen, where she and Kai have come to start afresh, Hilda feels invisible-adjacent, like a half-spun web.
Kai was raised in North Frisia, on the southern half of the Jutland peninsula, by expats from Aarhus. He grew up feeling a sense of belonging in Scandinavia, despite his German citizenship, and had accepted the position in the marine biology lab at the national institute for circumpolar studies largely out of homesickness. Hilda, for her part, had come with nothing but the pioneer heart bequeathed to her by generations of anabaptist ancestors. Here in this land of softened consonants and abbreviated vowels she knows how to place orders in restaurants, how to apologize when she bumps into someone on the tram or in the supermarket aisle, how to answer the telephone and say, “my husband is still at work, please try again later.” Conjugating irregular verbs, articulating hypothetical moods, “getting” jokes, and capturing nuance are, however, far beyond her ken. She lives in dread of unscripted conversations, which threaten to pierce the thin shield of her composure.
Luckily, Axel seems eager to flaunt his English. The performance of fluency obviously excites him. “What is it about the dollhouses?” he prods, twirling his glass on the zinc tabletop.
“Good question.” Hilda laughs. “I might ask you the same thing, I guess. You’re the only one who seems to share my appreciation.”
He smiles a bit sheepishly. “Full disclosure? I skip them Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”
“Do you?”
“To be honest, yeah. I mean, there tends to be less interest in nineteenth-century trophy assets than in the knarrs and the dinosaurs.”
“Understandable,” she murmurs, stroking the sides of her glass.
Providence, they always said, brought them together. Hilda was an apparel major at the Rhode Island School of Design, and Kai was concentrating in environmental studies at Brown. They met when he audited her ceramics elective and initially bonded over growing up in diasporic communities and speaking idiosyncratic German. He was the first person with whom she had felt the possibility of unmediated communication, and they had developed a kind of cryptophasia that allowed her, for the first time in her life, to fully articulate her desires.
Like, eventually, ik wol graach an expecting sei.
Her parents had never fully forgiven her for not marrying a Mennonite. When she wrote to tell them she was pregnant, she received only the perfunctory acknowledgement that characterized all their disapproval.
People had different ideas about what mattered. Motherhood had made her a miniaturist. “I guess—” She fingers the dangling thread of Axel’s opening gambit. “I believe in the significance of tiny things.”
He cocks a long, thick eyebrow.
She shrugs and slides a leather-bound notebook out from her satchel, careful not to let the little tube of scarlet lip gloss or the slender white gold band tumble out with it. “They’re good for vocabulary. So detailed and well-furnished.”
He opens the cover to the first page, where she has nibbed “Ordbog” with calligraphic flair. She can tell by the way he gently turns the pages that the foreplay would be special.
“But Traepanel? Vinaigrette? Babyudstyr? What’s the point of learning words like these—besides, I guess, extremely twee conversation about the elite private sphere?”
She laughs and shakes her head, unable to help noticing that bafflement becomes him. “Classist, but…fair.”
He takes a final swig and beckons toward the waitress for another round. “For real, though.”
“Just…to know.”
He leans toward her, smiling, close enough that she can see his pupils swell in their blue iris ponds. “Ever heard of Google translate?”
She snatches at the notebook in mock defensiveness, but his grip is firm. “Oh,” she sighs, as if in capitulation, keeping her tone playful: “You’ve obviously never been dispossessed.”
Her son’s name, Otto, had meant wealth. It was the only one she and Kai could agree on. They had haggled for eons, until toward the end of the third trimester they’d resorted to negotiating in absentia, leaving notes tucked inside the espresso maker, balanced atop the laundry hamper, wedged between the bathtub faucet and the backsplash of ochre tiles: “Franz? Rafael? Hugo?” followed by “Franz? Rudy? Rafael? Emil? Hugo? Lazarus?” “Otto?”—scribbled on the backside of a handwritten receipt and left curled into the tea kettle spout—peered out at her like a pince-nez. In the slight arc of the single cross spanning the t’s, which resembled a nose bridge conjoining two oval lenses, she recognized its inevitability.
Four days later he was born, two weeks ahead of schedule, in Brooklyn. They had not yet found a crib small enough to fit in their minuscule fifth floor walk-up and were still reeling from the cost of a secondhand stroller; but she had never felt so outrageously rich.
Despite their desperate eagerness to get to know him, Otto seemed in little rush to reciprocate his parents’ ardor. He slept as though birth had nearly annihilated him. His eyelids were so often pressed into crinkled slits that Hilda would ache for him to wake up the way other new mothers would confide that they longed for their newborns to sleep.
Meanwhile, the immediacy of her own connection to the baby astonished her. She had worried, for vague intergenerational reasons, about postpartum depression, but she found herself in a state of what she could only call, detesting the cliché of it, “pure bliss.” One day, observing them together, Kai said, “there’s a word for this in Danish, you know.”
“For what?”
“You and him. Being each other’s…everything, I guess.”
She nodded. “Yeah?”
“Forelsket.”
In his third or fourth month, Otto began to hold his head upright, to contort his features into silly expressions, to grasp at everything within reach. At the time it was as if suddenly—unexpectedly!—he became a person. His dark ringlets were as glossy as mulberries and his pair of wide-set turquoise eyes held a universe. Each of his nostrils formed a half-heart, and the lobes of his ears were perfect gibbous moons. He talked to her constantly with those eyes, his pudgy index fingers, his snorts and grunts, his frowns and grimaces, his chuckles and gummy grins. The world he shared with her became the only habitat in which she truly thrived.
In the aftermath of what happened, Hilda was afflicted by what the doctors called “elective mutism,” though nothing about it felt voluntary. For almost a year—exactly the length of time, almost to the day, that Otto had been on Earth—all her sentences deserted her, and everyone else’s struck her as obscene. Silence felt like the only way to honor such unfathomable loss. All the well-intentioned condolences and bereavement counseling sessions that she and Kai dutifully attended were gibberish to her. There was not even a term for what they now were. How could she be asked to describe, or “work through,” a condition that no one could name? When a Chinese friend who had been born in the early days of the one-child policy told her that such parents were called shidu fumu, she stroked the assonance like a prayer bead for weeks.
Every night, she held Kai as he wept, coveting the straightforwardness of his tears.
Upon arriving in Copenhagen, Kai had hired a Danish tutor for Hilda, a young woman more or less her age, with a steppe-like face—planar, expansive—and shallow-set eyes. At their first session, Astrid had been delighted to learn of her student’s background in Pennsylvania Dutch: “all Germanic languages share certain core genetic traits, so that’s an excellent basis!” she’d enthused. And Hilda had embarked on the project in good faith, mostly.
But it had only taken a few months for her to feel the effort was in vain. She hadn’t had the heart to tell Kai, who had submerged himself in work, spending long days at the office and evenings listening to narwhal chatter as he loaded the dishwasher or gazed out the window. Sometimes, he slipped his right earbud gently into her concha cavum so that she, too, could hear the clicks and squeals. He told her they held the key to understanding increased anxiety among monodon monoceros in the age of melting ice caps.
So, he still thinks she is with Astrid now, nearly a year later, learning which nouns are common and which neuter, memorizing irregular plurals, practicing the future tense.
Suddenly, it seems that the bill has been settled, and Axel is suggesting that they go back to his place. It’s close by, and it’s too soon for her to walk home alone just yet.
“I really shouldn’t,” she demurs, ambiguously, as he shepherds her into the thickening dusk.
She flatters herself that anyone, seeing them tilt together toward the night, would feel sure where it was headed.
The kiss, when it comes—in the vestibule of his neoclassical apartment building, against the scalloped banister—is better than she had expected. It almost extinguishes her resolve. She lets his mouth linger on hers and savors the hint of caraway on his insistent tongue.
“Follow me,” he murmurs, grabbing her wrist and starting to mount the staircase.
She lets stiffness seize her, like rigor mortis. “No.”
There is something excruciating about getting to decide—when, what, how, to whom. It is a power she had forgotten she could wield, rather than merely endure, and she pauses for a moment to feel the crushing heft of it.
“No.”
He presses her onward, eager for his entitlements. “Aren’t you coming?” The tenor of his voice is still light, but a patina of confusion begins to bloom on his pupils.
“No,” she repeats, rooting herself to the spot.
“Are you serious?” The way he looks at her, like a warrior denied his spoils, makes her feel a faint tingle of existence.
“Dead,” she whispers, clutching it tight.
The chain mail of her choice bears her through the darkling streets, toward where Kai will be waiting—always, but for how much longer?—for her to come and weave him back into the tapestry of their shared fate. He’ll be in the midst of some mundanity—grinding beans for the next morning’s espresso, balancing the checkbook, heating up leftovers for a late dinner—he for whom ephemerality has never been incompatible with importance. He will wonder where she’s been, sense her subtle air of triumph; she must find a plausible excuse. But then she will set out the bone china and the fancy silverware, pour sparkling water into cut glass, arrange a trio of beeswax tapers atop the embroidered tablecloth. With a lit match, she will drape flames over the candlewicks and watch everything opalesce. She will laugh when he asks what they are celebrating, joining her housebroken grief with his, at last, in the vast hall of their slain future. Who says they can’t yet make of it a home?
Elizabeth Brogden is a writer based in Cambridge, MA. Her work has appeared in Times Literary Supplement, Bellevue Literary Review, La Piccioletta Barca, and Full-Stop, among others. “The Valkyrie” was a finalist for the Kenyon Review’s 2024 Short Fiction Contest and is part of a larger collection-in-progress. She can be found online @golightlyeditorial or www.golightlyeditorial.com.
