creates a huge dream for himself which he can crawl inside like a voluminous overcoat. He realises at once that he loves her; in his dreams he furnishes her with a nose and transforms her into his vicarious mother.
Even though Janine is their common property, separate walls close tightly around their experiences. One cannot share everything; secrets must be carefully kept to oneself. A piece of crucial wisdom on life’s arduous path is to learn which dreams can be shared and which must be kept inside one’s own secret rooms.
Janine watches, listens and senses. She sees Sture’s tendency towards arrogance and bullying, she senses Hans’s longing for his absent mother. She sees the chasms that exist there, the huge differences. But one evening she teaches them to dance.
Kringström’s orchestra, which had played at every Saturday night dance since 1943, has testily accepted the challenge emanating from the increasingly discontented youth and has reluctantly begun to alter its repertoire. One Saturday in early spring they surprise everyone, not least themselves, by striking up a tune that might be related to the new music pouring in from the USA.
On this very evening Sture and Hans are hanging around outside the People’s Hall. Impatiently they are waiting until they’re big enough to buy their own tickets and step on to the crowded dance floor. The music comes through the walls, and Sture decides it’s time they learned how to dance.
Later that evening, when they are frozen and stiff, they wander down by the river bridge, race each other and yell underneath the iron span, and they don’t stop until they are standing outside Janine’s door. Music is coming through the walls. She’s playing tonight …
When she realises that they want to learn to dance, she is ready at once to teach them. Before the surgeon deformed her face, she had danced quite often. But she has not moved across a dance floor since. With a firm grip around the waist and simple repeated steps to the left and right, she leads them into the rhythmic stamping of the waltz and foxtrot. She keeps pressing them to her, one after the other, and sweeps around on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Whoever is not dancing runs the gramophone, and soon the windows are fogged up from their efforts to follow and keep track of the steps.
From a kitchen cabinet she pulls out a bottle of homemade booze. When they ask where she got hold of it she just laughs. She offers each of them only a little glass, but keeps on drinking until she gets drunk. She lights a cigar and blows smoke out her nose hole, while claiming to be the world’s only female locomotive. She tells them that sometimes she imagines how she will leave Hurrapelle’s penitent bench and vanish into the world of carnival sideshows. She will never be a prima donna on the slack wire, but perhaps a freak who can elicit horror from the crowd. Exhibiting deformed people for money is a tradition that has been lost in the mists of time. She tells them about the Laughing Kid, who had the corners of his mouth sliced open to his ears and was then sold to a carnival troupe and made his owners rich.
From a kitchen drawer she takes out a red clown nose which she fastens with an elastic string around her head, and dumbstruck they watch this woman who radiates so many contradictory powers. What is hardest to understand but also most disturbing is how Janine can live this double life: the barefoot dance on the kitchen floor, the booze in the cupboard; the hard pews in Hurrapelle’s church.
But her salvation is no fabrication. She has her God securely placed in her heart. Without the fellowship that the congregation once extended to her she would no longer be alive. This is not to say that she is attracted to or professes all the beliefs of the congregation. Raising money to send missionaries to distant Bantu tribes in Africa she considers not only meaningless but a serious violation of the decree that all faith
Even though Janine is their common property, separate walls close tightly around their experiences. One cannot share everything; secrets must be carefully kept to oneself. A piece of crucial wisdom on life’s arduous path is to learn which dreams can be shared and which must be kept inside one’s own secret rooms.
Janine watches, listens and senses. She sees Sture’s tendency towards arrogance and bullying, she senses Hans’s longing for his absent mother. She sees the chasms that exist there, the huge differences. But one evening she teaches them to dance.
Kringström’s orchestra, which had played at every Saturday night dance since 1943, has testily accepted the challenge emanating from the increasingly discontented youth and has reluctantly begun to alter its repertoire. One Saturday in early spring they surprise everyone, not least themselves, by striking up a tune that might be related to the new music pouring in from the USA.
On this very evening Sture and Hans are hanging around outside the People’s Hall. Impatiently they are waiting until they’re big enough to buy their own tickets and step on to the crowded dance floor. The music comes through the walls, and Sture decides it’s time they learned how to dance.
Later that evening, when they are frozen and stiff, they wander down by the river bridge, race each other and yell underneath the iron span, and they don’t stop until they are standing outside Janine’s door. Music is coming through the walls. She’s playing tonight …
When she realises that they want to learn to dance, she is ready at once to teach them. Before the surgeon deformed her face, she had danced quite often. But she has not moved across a dance floor since. With a firm grip around the waist and simple repeated steps to the left and right, she leads them into the rhythmic stamping of the waltz and foxtrot. She keeps pressing them to her, one after the other, and sweeps around on the linoleum of the kitchen floor. Whoever is not dancing runs the gramophone, and soon the windows are fogged up from their efforts to follow and keep track of the steps.
From a kitchen cabinet she pulls out a bottle of homemade booze. When they ask where she got hold of it she just laughs. She offers each of them only a little glass, but keeps on drinking until she gets drunk. She lights a cigar and blows smoke out her nose hole, while claiming to be the world’s only female locomotive. She tells them that sometimes she imagines how she will leave Hurrapelle’s penitent bench and vanish into the world of carnival sideshows. She will never be a prima donna on the slack wire, but perhaps a freak who can elicit horror from the crowd. Exhibiting deformed people for money is a tradition that has been lost in the mists of time. She tells them about the Laughing Kid, who had the corners of his mouth sliced open to his ears and was then sold to a carnival troupe and made his owners rich.
From a kitchen drawer she takes out a red clown nose which she fastens with an elastic string around her head, and dumbstruck they watch this woman who radiates so many contradictory powers. What is hardest to understand but also most disturbing is how Janine can live this double life: the barefoot dance on the kitchen floor, the booze in the cupboard; the hard pews in Hurrapelle’s church.
But her salvation is no fabrication. She has her God securely placed in her heart. Without the fellowship that the congregation once extended to her she would no longer be alive. This is not to say that she is attracted to or professes all the beliefs of the congregation. Raising money to send missionaries to distant Bantu tribes in Africa she considers not only meaningless but a serious violation of the decree that all faith
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