The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Page B

word, just stands tied to a post in the middle of the stage, waiting for the dawn and the fire. It opened with an ominous line: En hund hyler i natten —a dog howls in the night—and because I was uneasy about the chill we seemed to have created, and wanted to kid things back to normal, I leaned toward the countess and whispered, “Hey, I understood that!”
    In the dusk her eyes were large and brilliant. It was almost like skaal’ ing the lady on your left. But she was not smiling. She gave the back of my hand a little pat. “You understand everything,” she said.
    But the fact was, I never understood another mumbling word. I didn’t understand the woman beside me, or the people I caught trying not to be seen looking our way when the lights came up, any more than I understood what was going on on stage, where strange monsters out of some bestiary crept out of the woods and frolicked or mourned around Joan at her stake.
    Neither of the ladies wanted to go to the D’Angleterre for a bite and a drink after the show. We walked home, talking more animatedly than we felt about the opera, and when we were back at the apartment the countess very soon said her thanks and good night and shut her door. For quite a while Ruth and I lay awake wondering what we had witnessed. Ruth had the impression that we had been stared at with hostility, simply because of the woman we were with. Mystery. The Danes are notably uncensorious, yet here is a woman whom all of Copenhagen cuts dead. We recollect that since we moved in with her nobody has rung her doorbell.
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    April 13:
    Our Rover is on the free port dock. I spent the day persuading six thousand three hundred and eighteen petty bureaucrats that I don’t intend to sell it in the black market but will guarantee to export it to the United States when we leave Denmark. And what is your business in Denmark, Mr. Allston? Tourist? Yes. And how long will you stay? Three or four months? Mmmm. The question stuck out of them in embossed letters: why? I told one particularly nosy gentleman that I was writing a book about Danish democracy, and that corked him.
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    April 17 :
    Two days lost to a raging migraine. I find myself thinking about the office. Homesick, the forsaken fire horse. This suspended life, this waiting for decent weather or for me to feel better, gets more tedious than I would have believed. A visit to one of the local specialized medics (a pleasant man, I must say, and a cultivated one, not just a mechanic who has studied medical Latin) assures me that my ekg is indeed back to normal. Can’t lay any blame on the ticker. So I develop a migraine. Cunning of me.
    The countess is our only drama. For a couple of days we didn’t catch more than glimpses of her, because she had got a job doing some interior decorating and supervising the purchase of furniture and pictures for a French Embassy couple named La Derrière. She came out of her sober mood enough to giggle over that, and kept referring to them as Mrs. and Mrs. Behind. But mostly, when she hasn’t been out, she has been shut up in her studio, presumably sketching and working. It seems unnatural and unfriendly to keep so separate. We wonder if she is being scrupulous about intruding on us, or if she is avoiding us because of that night at the theater.
    This morning as we were having breakfast by the windows we heard her go down the hall to the kitchen and looked at each other. Shouldn’t we ask her to join us? But I had barely pushed back my chair when her steps returned, positive and fast, and her door clicked shut. Such is our human complexity, we felt snubbed, at least I did. In her room the radio came on with its gobbledegook Danish news, most of which these days is about Senator McCarthy, a constant rebuke to our innocent assumption of American prestige in the world.
    After lunch Ruth drove us (I was over the migraine, but feeling pale) up to Dyrehaven to try out the