9. Because folke s large in every way, he s got a car to match. That s not something Sonja had considered in switching driving instructors; that she should go from Jytte s Hyundai to an Audi q5. It s the size of a camper, black as a Batmobile, and Folke s sitting in it with beard outthrust. Today I want to test you, he says. Test me? Sonja casts a sidelong glance at the bag of Gösta that she s just deposited on the backseat. The books are for Folke to take home to his wife. It s also Sonja s plan that they ll talk about Folke s wife as much as they possibly can. It should be as if she s there with them in the car. The wife and Gösta and Folke and Sonja. I need to see, of course, what you ve learned with Jytte, so now we re going to drive into a neighborhood where the intersections are unmarked. You ll help me with the gearstick, won t you? Folke points down in between the seats. There it is. It s not the placement, it s the handling, Sonja says, but she shouldn t have. 77
dorthe nors Or rather, she shouldn t have said it in quite that way. Now Folke s compelled to quiver his eyebrows. He s compelled to tell her that obviously she s a big girl. Sonja pretends that she doesn t understand the sexual innuendo. She s not paying four hundred crowns an hour for sexual innuendo. It s nice that your wife s a reader, she says, putting the car into first gear. She s able to do that just fine. She s also able to look back at her blind spot. She signals and drives away from the curb; second gear. Pretty good, says Folke, and he directs her into a neighborhood with unmarked intersections. Neighborhoods with unmarked intersections are Sonja s bugaboo. It s not only that nobody knows who s supposed to yield to whom. It s also because people park along the curbs. That makes the streets so pinched, they get scarily narrow and are studded with cars whose doors open suddenly, temperamentally. Sometimes the parked cars function as hiding places for kids, and kids lives are governed by impulse. Back when Sonja drove with Jytte, Jytte also kept telling her to stop driving into other cars ears! Naturally, Sonja didn t know what that meant at first. But the ears turned out to be their side-view mirrors, and Sonja wasn t supposed to drive into them, and now Folke and Sonja are alone in the car. Sonja pulls herself together in every way. She and Folke both have their seats pushed back so that their long legs have room. Her feet pump the pedals, her fingers clench the wheel. They clench the wheel so tight that she automatically veers left when she lets go with her 78
mirror, shoulder, signal right hand to change gears. It s difficult to find third. Her driving s unsteady, and Folke s Audi is too big for the street they re going down. Work with the car, use your body, use your body! says Folke. But Sonja s body cannot get from second to third. She s stalled twice now. Then let s pull over here to the side, Folke says in a soft voice. He helps her to turn the wheel as well. Someplace over in the bottom of Folke s side of the Batmobile he manages to brake, and now they re satisfactorily stopped behind a Toyota. Give me your hand, Folke says, and she doesn t want to, but she gives Folke her hand anyway. He takes the hand and places it on the gearstick. Can you feel it? She can, and then Folke places his hand over hers. Sonja can now feel both the gearstick and Folke s hand. Then he begins to move their stacked hands: the gearstick is activated. You have to imagine an H with two segments poking out of the middle, and then we do like this... You cannot make diagonal movements with the stick, Folke explains. You cannot go from second to third by taking a shortcut. You have to follow the construction of the gearbox. That all makes sense to Sonja, but she has a hard time concentrating with Folke s hand on top of hers. There, he says, and lifts his hand. Now we ll try it in real life. Mirror, shoulder, signal: Sonja tries to use her body, but the car s too big. 79
dorthe nors Throw the car, c mon, throw it! he exclaims. But is it even possible to throw a car? Is it possible to do from the inside? Driving instructor lingo makes Sonja insecure, and she s insecure enough as it is with the car, the gearstick, the social aspect of the situation. Her insecurity s due to an underlying fear of inadequacy, Molly would say. It s awful being a disappointment to both yourself and others, and Sonja s solution is to talk. Speech has horsepower and direction. With speech, she can do what she can t do with the car: she can throw it, and if she just jabbers away, she ll become a person in Folke s eyes. I completely forgot to tell you, but it s me who translates Gösta Svensson into Danish, she says. Get out of here! The bag on the backseat s for you, she says. It s got books. You can give them to your wife. Folke rotates his large body around and grabs hold of the book bag. Back in the front seat, he immediately starts pulling books out of it. Gösta s novel Black Blood flies up onto the dashboard. Same for The Girl from Riga, a harrowing read about human trafficking, as one reviewer s quoted as saying on the back cover. Folke s thrilled. He forgets to advise Sonja on her driving. That doesn t matter, because it s going better with the gears, while Folke leafs through the books. He wants to know if translating s hard. He also wants to know if there s any money in that shit, and he wants to know where Sonja learned Swedish. In this way, she gets a chance to tell him that she s the first in her family to go to university. Her sister s a home care assistant, and her brother-in-law works at a wind turbine plant. Sonja also 80
mirror, shoulder, signal succeeds in saying that her father s a farmer, and that she comes from a parish that lies so far west that Folke s probably never been there. Nope, never been that far from Copenhagen. I ve been to Croatia, Germany, and large stretches of France. But nothing beyond that. I only go places you can drive to in a car. I m afraid of flying. I love flying, says Sonja. Folke gives a convincing display of fear on his side of the car, and once Sonja read that men who are unfaithful exhibit an especial fear of flying. They project their fear of being caught in infidelity onto the flying situation. Being unable to escape. Being at the mercy of another man, the pilot. They can walk around and feel reasonably fine about their deceit down on the ground. But at altitude, the consequences dawn on them in a different way. They realize that they don t have solid earth underfoot, that they risk losing it all. Because you really can; you can risk losing everything when you lie. Sonja winds through a chicane designed to slow traffic. Folke claps her on her gear hand. But anyway, Sonja says, getting her hand back up on the wheel, where I come from, things aren t the same anymore. Oh no? No, the farming operations have gotten so huge, she says. They buy up everything around them. My parents farm was bought up by a hog breeder they call Bacon Bjarne. Now my folks live in a house in Balling. My sister too. That s why the smaller farms stand empty, and when they re empty, there are no families with kids living there, and when there aren t kids, there s no one to go to school. Then the schools 81