Title image What is Holy (Hawk) by Tina Berrier. Acrylic, charcoal, and spray paint on cradled wood panel and newsprint, 12″ by 12″, 2019.
I Hold
by Helene Grøn
Heaven
When they sit around the fire after a long day’s work, doing not what we would – writing letters on paper, transferred to action, or planting boots on land, declaring ‘this is mine’ – the stories they tell each other are not of eternity and the cosmos, but of us, humans.
‘Today, I saw a woman carrying her grocery bags,’ The First begins, ‘as if the limp of the unequal weight had become her perpetual way of walking.’
‘And I saw,’ The Third interrupts the agreed-upon pause for contemplation, ‘the magnetic force between a city’s stones – composed, not just of material, but also of memory.’ The two others exchange glances. ‘When I looked long enough,’ The Third continues, ‘they attracted and repelled each other, like a dance, even when seeming still.’
The Third, the two others agree, had lost perspective lately. An eternity ago, they had conceded that the only way to circumvent the inevitable boredom resulting from the divinely appointed task of observing humans in their natural habitat was to keep their eyes on the shifts and shapes of the mundane.
The Third, no stranger to the others’ glances, bellows with angelic almightiness ‘This was in the smallness of a life!’ and after a dramatic pause, revelling in their undivided attention, adds, ‘I have looked through time and found other patterns like this, bricks holding stories.’
This time, the pause for contemplation is observed. So long is an angelic thought that human eyes would be tempted to think these figures statuesque, only broken, finally, by The Second softly asking, ‘Have you any idea how revolutionary this is, if it is true?’
The First, still sceptical, murmurs, ‘So the place itself—?’
‘Yes,’ The Third interrupts, ‘it remembers its humans.’
Lecturing Room
Anker, her father, had achieved what no scholar had before, reaching such strange celebrity in his later years that he could fill a lecture room to the brim.
“Is this how you remember him, too?” Medhi had asked, when she pressed pause on the recording of her father’s most well-loved talk. His heartbeat against her back had reminded her to take deeper breaths, but even then, she didn’t know how to answer.
His central thesis? Just as we remember places, places also remember us.
It is a flaw in our human geography, Anker argued, that we believe memory belongs only to us.
He had captured his audience with a simple gesture: Raise your hand, he’d demanded, if you’ve ever had the feeling of returning to a place and, without warning, remembered something that had happened there? As if the place had kept it safe, had waited quietly for your return. This sea of raised hands — that unabashed rooting of emotional truth in his scholarly authority — was what set everything in motion.
‘Every city,’ Anker says at the start of the recording, ‘every country has a story, a myth. Think of Rome and its warring brothers. Think of Buda and Pest becoming one. What do they have in common? They are humans telling the story of a place.’
‘As if,’ he laughs — a little too theatrically for Desirée at this part — ‘it didn’t exist before us.’
‘As if,’ he chuckles again, ‘it won’t continue after us.’
Whether he had broken with the academy, or the academy had broken with him, was still unclear to Desirée. She did know that there was no love lost, even with the colleagues who had followed him as far as they could into this murky scholarly terrain. At the end of the day, they liked the certainty of things. This stone. This place in history. But, separately, and in the loneliness of their offices, or as they walked through their cities, or as they spent sleepless nights in professorial contemplation, they had all secretly admitted Anker’s thesis to be true.
‘I am asking you to think in reverse,’ his recorded voice tells the audience. ‘What would a place’s story be of us? Ask this, I dare you, not just in the minutiae of your daily lives, but also in the larger context of history.’
The students who had loved him, loved him still; and they had brought their friends, and the friends of those friends, until one of them uploaded this lecture online, and there, in that digital echo, this strange, intense father of hers had become a topic not only at dinner tables, in elevators, among strangers, but also on talk shows and in the corridors of power. It seemed he had struck a global nerve. He had united the exiles, refugees—and even those uneventful citizens for whom ‘home’ had never been more than a mild existential annoyance—over a collective truth they each had felt, but never named.
You are not crazy, he had told them implicitly, to believe that a brick, or a tree, or a street remembers.
Another city
“Why don’t you tell us something we don’t know?” Olsen had asked in her usual unceremonious manner when Anker had shown them the lecture. For as long as Desirée could remember, Olsen had known better than anyone how stories lodged in their places, how meaning clung to matter. She had always intuited connections between things.
“This stone feels homeless,” she’d said once, as a child, pointing to a crooked, discoloured stone on the street they passed to and from school. “It doesn’t belong in this building — not with the others.”
Desirée found such things strange at the time, but sure enough, years later, their high school geography teacher had confirmed that some of the stones in the city’s architecture came from the southern islands, placed at random when bricklayers ran short of local material.
On their first trip as lovers, fingers braiding giddily with new couplehood, Olsen paused on their tour around the neighbouring town, saying, “Something happened here.”
To their guide’s surprised, “You heard?” Olsen responded, “I felt” in a tone only Desirée could hear.
“The street was sealed off,” the guide had continued, “because of the plague. Lots of children died, even those not yet sick.”
Even after they’d decided they were better off as friends, Desirée clung to the conviction that she’d had a small part to play in Olsen’s finding of her true calling as an eccentric, but well-loved, tour guide.
“Someone has to tell these stories,” Olsen had said to Anker over dinner that night. Desirée had watched him pat her cheek with the quiet affection of a proud father. Anker had been so gentle with their metamorphosis, smiling with a that makes sense, when they first got together, smiling with a that makes sense, when they broke up. Conducting himself with this quiet approval had deterred any bitterness Desirée and Olsen could have mounted when transitioning between intimacies.
City Center
Desirée and Anker spent their days in silent reproach after she told him that her chosen university was in the city he’d left as a child. He thought he’d have her closer for longer—a mistake many parents make, but he also didn’t think that his own flesh and blood—that something he’d built and nourished—would force the past on him so.
‘Conflict or complications with place is never isolated to a generation,’ Anker will say later in his lecture, ‘Rupture and stories cross time, bodies, memories. We pass these things on, but we also heal these things over time.’
As a child, both of the thinker and of the father, Desirée had grown increasingly incensed that he had fallen so easily into the scholarly trap of thinking well at the edge of the known, but living foolishly in his personal life. How could he have overlooked that leaving a part of his past untold and unvisited would force her on a search for its meaning?
After many a dinner with Anker’s lecture and Desiree’s departure making up the better part of the conversation, Olsen proposed a test-tour as a solution. “Come on,” she’d argued against Desirée’s tantrum-like reluctance, “What better way to say ‘So long’ to the places and people you love?”
♦ ♦ ♦
“The city center,” Olsen begins, as they arrive at the main square, “was redesigned by a Dutch architect after the fire in the 1800s. He brought with him the shapes and colours of his home.”
Anker nods, naming the architectural flourishes, traces of civic ambition, patterns he’s seen echoed in other towns of the era. Before Desirée can summon the energy to be annoyed that her father can’t walk a step without showcasing his knowledge, Olsen has interrupted. “Yes, yes,” she says, “But rumour has it he came here heartbroken. His lover back home had married a merchant’s daughter.”
Anker’s face shifts with this new version.
“It is everywhere around us,” Olsen continues, “See those two male heads on either side of the town hall, looking longingly down on the kissing statue in its middle?” Desirée follows her gaze, and the town square she has known her whole life is made new to her.
“That one,” Olsen points, “looks just like the architect. The other? His lover, who he called the person dearest to my heart.”
She opens her notebook and continues, “In his diaries, the drawings of the buildings blur into the sketches of his lover’s face. He was clearly processing.”
“But,” she adds with a wink to Desirée, “it was probably for the best he didn’t work it all out in public, or our city would have looked very strange.” At the same time, in the same way, Anker and Desirée smile, and a small space opens between them.
“Now, I was looking through his diaries,” Olsen continues, leading them down another street, “and I thought about the story of the three angels you always told us as kids, Anker. There are angels in his drawings, too. Three, always three, watching people from rooftops and windows.”
Anker begins to reply, “Of course, these angels, they narrate the stories of humans—” but Olsen raises a hand.
“I am tracing the myth,” she says, “Across Europe, stories are passed down – fragments, sketches, footnotes – of angels watching how humans and place braid their stories together.”
She stops in front of the old mayor’s house, pointing to the three figures carved at the top.
“You’ve seen these before, right?” she says, “Commerce, Justice, Abundance—clearly drawn from Greek mythology.” Before Anker can start again, Olsen positions them both, just so, on the corner. “But in this light, seen from this angle. You see?”
The stone gleams differently now. Wings, subtle but definite, unfurl from each figure’s back.
Anker is quiet. His eyes narrow. How has he, in all his years of thinking and looking, never seen what is so blatantly obvious?
“Amazing. Just amazing,” he breathes.
“And it is not just here,” Olsen continues, “I’m finding the angels in paintings and poems, especially by our exiled artists. People who lost their places in history, their homes, and wrote their way back to them. People who used imagination the way the architect did: to process, to preserve, and maybe even to make it beautiful.”
After a pause, Olsen turns to Anker, “What does the geographer say to that?”
He opens his mouth and closes it again. He smiles. The pink façade of the townhouse catches the evening light. His skin, Desirée notices, is a map, folding over, making canyons and mountains.
“Isn’t the geographer supposed to be brave?” Desirée asks. And after a pause she adds, taking his hand, “Come visit me when I go? Show me around?”
And the angels that night will tell of the embrace like this: Between flesh, bones colliding, whispering, communing—like stones asking each other, when brought together in buildings, ‘Is this a good resting place for you?’
Restaurant
“You’re asking a lot,” Olsen had said when Desirée called to invite her to the wedding, “but of course I’ll come.” Desirée had offered her a place to stay, to which Olsen had replied, “Let’s not push it.” They’d settled on dinner instead.
♦ ♦ ♦
And so she watched the two great loves of her life, the tour guide and the one who knew about leaving, find common ground.
“I hear the jasmine flowers grow in spring,” Olsen said, and Desirée knew that Olsen reading about Medhi’s home was her way of declaring acceptance.
Medhi’s face and body opened to meet Olsen’s questions. Even now, when the smell of jasmine caught him off guard somewhere, it undid him. It was scent as a memory, and memory as a vessel to another place and time.
Desirée let him continue the story of how they met. He had practiced his language by refining their lore, but these days, he liked to begin with, “We are not just two people meeting. I think… we are many places meeting.”
♦ ♦ ♦
She hadn’t been back to the cemetery since the day she met Medhi, since the day her father had been buried next to his own father.
Even if it was, as Olsen had told her many times, a closing of circles, even if it was a kind of peace, she couldn’t quite shake the guilt that she was the one who had brought her father back. But only the angels, those old purveyors of palatial coincidences, know that Desirée and Medhi saw their remaining parent for the last time on the same day. That, a world apart, her father and his mother parted from their children at the same moment.
♦ ♦ ♦
As Desirée and Anker stepped onto the cemetery grounds where her grandfather was buried, Medhi’s mother stroked his cheek, both hoping it wasn’t their last touch, both knowing it was.
When Medhi was driving to the bigger city from which his onward journey would go, Anker broke his years of silence in front of his father’s grave, “My mother saw that the walls were closing in on our free thinkers. She couldn’t stop him from writing, from speaking. She couldn’t stop me from adoring him either.” He had said it while Medhi, halfway across the world, was hidden on the vehicles he had to trust were leading him away from danger.
“She was scared they’d take us both,” Anker continued, as Medhi watched videos on his phone: a sister’s laugh, a brother playing, a mother’s voice from another time. “When she saw he’d never leave, she made a difficult choice,” Anker looked down at the ground, while Medhi fell asleep to the rocking of the vessel—his dreams, a small mercy, were of sitting in the garden next to his long-dead father, looking at the evening stars.
“When we finally settled,” Anker said, “she stopped talking about him, little by little, and I understood I had to stop too.”
“Except,” he paused, “the story of the angels. That was one he told me when I was a child.”
Desirée laid her head on his shoulder. The weight of it rooted him unapologetically to the earth, to the rock spelling out his father’s unspoken name. There was nothing else he needed to do in this life.
“When I die,” Anker said — the sentence all children fear to hear, and all parents dread to utter — “bury me here. And come visit once in a while.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“The first time we met,” Medhi cut in, his voice soft and present, “was at the grief group. She asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. I said I am not good company, and she just said ‘Me neither,’ and asked ‘Coming?’ from the door.”
Where Olsen had always intuited the stories of a place, Desirée knew when to puncture people’s solitude. She said, “It is best to grieve in company.” And he’d told her that’s exactly what his lawyer said too. She recommended the group when it became clear that there was no way he could go back to care for his dying mother or, later, to attend her funeral, without his claim for safety being annulled.
“I didn’t know lawyers did that,” Desirée had said.
“This one,” he replied, his language less fluent then, than now, “this one has a heart.”
Today
Imagine the angels, gathered again by the fire, piecing these stories together.
The First would begin with the Town Hall, waking up and getting ready for another wedding in its belly: It shakes its head, making the clocks chime with news of morning to wake the two lovers in the apartment across the square. The walls around the lovers are newer, pulled together with speed and economy, a patchwork of materials so hastily combined that they’ve hardly had time to gather themselves. But the couple is giving them stories, and the walls, eager, porous, are starting to remember.
And on this morning, the two lovers begin like this: Watching videos of their absent parents. A lecture from a father. An old birthday message from a mother. So, they will be there too, in a way, on this day. In the bathroom, the tiles observe while the woman’s former lover readies her friend to make beautiful promises. Everything within and around the former lover knows that the small ache she feels will not break her. Through her work, through story, stone, myth, she has learned the metamorphosis of all things. There is no need to cement a story already sealed in the membranes of buildings, rivers, and skin.
A lawyer with a heart shows up at the town hall to be a witness. This is not in her job description, but she likes this man, and she likes being part of his belonging.
And the couple, well, they are, as one of them likes to say, the meeting of places.
The angels tell: They will combine those places in ways they cannot yet imagine, in the birth of a child, who will receive all these stories, not as a conflict, but as a gift. She will be the first to be tickled in the room that is now still her parents’ bedroom, and the walls will agree to remember how this felt. How laughter travelled between skin and sunlight.
Like her mother, the daughter will go back to her dad’s home. The city and her kin will speak to her in broken sentences. She will have the patience to piece them together.
In front of the remains of her father’s childhood house, she will remember the story of what her mother’s best friend whispered to her mother, just before she walked up the steps to meet her father at their wedding:
‘Do you know what places say most?’ she whispers. Her mother shakes her head.
‘I hold,’ the friend says, and takes her hand.
Author’s note:
I am indebted to Martin Shaw for the thought that angels want to hear the stories of us after carrying out their long day’s work. This story was written on a residence at the Karl Ristikivi House in Tartu, supported by the UNESCO City of Literature. I thank the town, the network, Marja Unt and all other friend-kin-writers gathering in Tartu.
Helene Grøn is a writer and researcher based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work explores themes of migration, myth, and belonging through fiction, libretto, and poetic nonfiction. Helene has taught creative writing at the University of Copenhagen. Her writing has appeared in Dark Mountain, Peripeti, and in performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
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