Free Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) by Dorthe Nors

Ellen. They were full of stories, and right from the beginning they wanted to tell them all, and when they did they would look at him as if to encourage him to learn them by heart. Aunt Ellen, for instance, told how one time toward the end of the war they were baking vanilla cookies, but then the mailman came. As he turned into the farmyard, Grandmother got down on the floor and began to scrub the linoleum with her ass in the air. Grandfather was sitting in the parlor studying aerial photos of Leipzig and his mother had gone out to the rabbits in the cowshed. It was nearly Christmas and the mailman winked at Aunt Ellen and said something about the vanilla cookies smelling good. Grandmother sat like a mermaid on the floor and said with a giggle that she couldn’t get up again. The mailman had to help her while Ellen tried to close the door into the parlor with cookie dough on her hands.
    But what bothered Aunt Ellen was afterward when the mailman had gone and Grandfather went out to the rabbits. Grandmother had that look on her face. She stood at the kitchen sink with one of Aunt Ellen’s vanilla cookies in her mouth and said it had no taste.
    “She could be like that,” Aunt Ellen had said so often, and he doesn’t know how many times he saw his mother nod and put in her two cents. “You remember what she was like, don’t you?” they would say, and scrutinize him.
    He remembers his grandmother well. She was small, almost like a child, though very round. She had five children, and her sons left home as soon as they could. He doesn’t remember Grandfather, and to him Grandmother was a woman who lived in an apartment building in town and grew increasingly odd, while Aunt Ellen and his mother took turns making dinner for her. Certain smells made him think of her, smells that linger in the bathroom, or bergamot candy in the kitchen. Or the sight of dish mats and the plastic souvenirs his mother and Aunt Ellen brought home from vacations. And her hands, mostly her hands. They were as small as a little girl’s and never at rest. Small and fluttering. How strange to think it was those hands that did it. The thing his mother claimed they did.
    Another story they liked to tell was about the last years of the war when the tethered cow had to be moved. His mother loved it when Aunt Ellen told the story. She would light up a cigarette and sit nodding with it. It happened when the Allies attacked the landing strip and the Germans retaliated. Grandmother was afraid the cow tied up in the meadow would be killed. So Aunt Ellen had to go and move it. Of course, she was afraid, but Grandmother insisted the cow be brought to safety. Naturally, the animal was terrified, so it galloped around with Aunt Ellen hanging on to the rope behind it. The planes were diving in over the trees and the southern end of the potato field. Grandmother crawled on all fours to the gable end of the house to find shelter from the shrapnel.
    “There she was with her ass in the air barking out instructions about which way I should run.”
    That’s how Aunt Ellen told the story, and then she would grimace and stress that the secret to understanding Grandmother was that she wasn’t very intelligent. She was stupid, Aunt Ellen would say, and his mother would snigger and Aunt Ellen would look at her sister with a flicker in her eye.
    “That’s the way she was. Mother was stupid.”
    It always went quiet between them then. Aunt Ellen would change the subject, or decide it was time to go home. She lived in the building opposite and the last thing he and his mother always did before they went to bed was stand at the window of the living room and wave to her.
    All the time his mother lay sick, she and Ellen never spoke of Grandmother and her ways. But then his mother died, and after the funeral the subject came up between him and Aunt Ellen. It was his initiative. He took his aunt to a cafeteria and asked her about the old days. He assumed it was for want of