'woman by the window No. 1' by Hunjung Kim; oil on wood
I like to think that books find their way into our hands when it's their time to be read as this one did. The story of endings, new beginnings, and rediscovery of self, it's a portrait of a woman who lives in a small village in rural Denmark. Fru Bagge, as she's called through most of the book, arrived in Thyregod as a young schoolteacher in 1904, and now, a little over twenty years later, her husband Vigand is dying in hospital and she's facing a new phase of her life.
When she comes across an abandoned diary she doesn't remember having, she begins documenting her days. At first, these are comprised of daily visits to the hospital to sit at Vigand's bedside where he always seems to be asleep or pretending to be, and time at home feeling not quite at home. Even in early entries there is a sense of other emotions running underneath and too many unspoken words in the marriage. Vigand Bagge was the district physician for a far-flung, poverty-stricken, rural part of western Denmark; he was a dedicated doctor and well-respected, but not one with a compassionate bedside manner. From the doctor's house on a barren, windswept hill with the village spread out at its foot, Fru Bagge starts rummaging through drawers and cupboards, and her life.
The house is provided to the district doctor by the parish council, so leaving it is part of the coming change. In his typical way Vigand made arrangements for her without ever mentioning a word about them, and left a brief letter informing her of what he has done.
Yet the fact remains, and I must never forget it, that he has provided for me…
She has a cushion of time before she must leave the house, she doesn't need to panic over finances, and he even suggested another place for her to move to. When she returns to the house after his death, she empties drawers and cupboards everywhere, even pulling the books in his study off the shelves to shake them looking for—she doesn't even know what exactly, 'something personal'. She thinks about the time shortly before Vigand checked himself into hospital and what he might say now about what she's doing and thinking. She grieves for this man, for what was there and what wasn't.
No more will he come striding unapproachably through the living room. No more will I sit opposite a raised newspaper at the breakfast table. Never again hear the sound of running water as I pause on the landing. He took cold showers. His meager body must have shivered. Vigorously he would dry himself, dropping the towel on the floor when he was done, then stepping over it with his head lifted to the day, already immersed in things to be done, oblivious to himself.
In the early part of the book it's as though Fru Bagge is sitting up, rubbing her eyes, and looking around at her surroundings, and seeing them as if for the first time while slowly letting her tensed muscles start to relax. Memories of Vigand and those he treated, of neighbors, of incidents, go through her mind, and then memories of her life before she married gradually start to seep in.
When doing her training to be a free school teacher, from the stories she tells she was energetic and social, spending evenings with good friends Dagny, Erland, and Ervin, and her memories of the time are filled with light and laughter and learning. The young Lilly Høy accepted the offer from Thyregod to become the teacher at their new free school, and she arrived in the nearby town of Give in January 1904 with a duffel bag and bicycle. She vigorously embraced the job and became a key member of the community.
But memories are only part of what she writes about, much is going on in her life. She buys back the car Vigand sold, reconnects with people in the village, reconnects with the self she was when she first arrived, leaves the doctor's house on the barren, windswept hill, and moves to a cottage near the village. Like one of the plants in the garden she now has, her life gradually unfurls.
It's not only the picture of Lilly that fills out and gains life, so does the village and people in and around it. She is a person who notices, and one of the joys of the book are her careful observations, from the lives of widows to seeing her little school for the first time.
The schoolroom with its desks and blackboard, the round, black tiled stove and the peat box. A tall, glass-fronted cupboard with reading books and songbooks in it, and on the wall a series of educational posters depicting family life, peat-cutting and autumnal ploughing. A picture of a city, and one of winter. Varnished floorboards and three very large windows, through which the light would pour in the daytime. Yes, I was most happy with what I saw. In the hallway from where I had come, the floor was tiled, and therefore easily mopped, and on the walls there were coat hooks and twenty cubby holes containing twenty new pairs of small cloth slippers, one pair in each.
She's an honest chronicler, she's not easy on herself and is blunt about her disappointments. She doesn't sugarcoat the hard lives of the people in the district, but also describes funny incidents and happinesses in their lives. Most of the diary's entries run from October 1927 through February 1928. It starts with a couple of interrupted entries when she first came to Thyregod in 1904, and finishes up with a few more entries in 1929 and 1932 that tell of other happenings in her life as she leaves behind her former life in the doctor's house on the barren, windswept hill.
A Change of Time is a quiet book that often takes a reader by surprise with something that happens or is said or observed. And it was a book I didn't want to put down. The way Ida Jessen slowly builds up the story of Lilly's life, adding in background, making connections, and opening up possibilities is masterful. Martin Aitken's translation is a pleasure to read and this marvelous book is a wonderful start to my reading year.
(A Change of Time was translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken and published by Archipelago Books in 2019; in a bit of book serendipity it fits in Annabel's (AnnaBookBel) Nordic FINDS reading event.)
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