__________________ HANNA RUT CARLSSON THE LAST AUTUMN IN LEGOLAND A TRAGEDY __________________ SISTA HÖSTEN I LEGOLAND Norstedts 2019, 305 pages Sample translation of pages 5-69, by Saskia Vogel Norstedts Agency [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Four acts: SAND, SUN, RAIN & SEA Dramatis personae: AMIR, oracle (if but an unorthodox one, the reader will just have to deal with it) KATJA, biology student MALIK, architect and father JOANNA, schoolchild and daughter ALICE, recently graduated literary scholar additionally MIRANDA and IRVING, Amir’s oracle colleagues LEO, SUSANNE and CLAIRE, fellow commune dwellers of Katja and Amir’s sanitation workers HALIMA and UBAH the young men MALTE, KONRAD and MADS various Copenhageners (extras) Scene: COPENHAGEN 2 SAND 3 row, row 4 IT IS THE LAST of all autumns. Far away in West Jutland a storm is tearing through the protected sand dunes. The Nature Conservation Commission’s signs are being tossed around by the wind; two past-season German tourists drive past without seeing them. Unwittingly, they park their motor home illegally in the middle of the beach. Beyond the thin walls the storm is yowling. Thundering masses of water come crashing across the beach: it is the sea. The sea, from which life comes, and to which life will once again return. But the German tourists can barely hear the waves. They’re being drowned out by the howling wind and the sand hammering against the motor home. Darkness falls and they heat stew up on the gas stove, play two rounds of Uno. The ruckus outside starts to settle and they make their bed believing that the storm has blown over, but in fact their motor home has been buried, packed in, become but a bulge in the raging darkness. The protected sand dunes rise up, whirl whining high into the air, and the next morning they roll in over Copenhagen. 5 THE ORACLES ARRIVE The oracles Amir, Miranda, and Irving walk down Nørrebrogade. It is dawn and very windy. The streets are almost empty. Amir walks along, writing on the wall next to him with a permanent marker, but puts it away when he spots two sanitation workers up ahead. Irving looks at Amir’s marker, Miranda’s painted nails, his own threadbare suit. IRVING: What a certifiably shitty job. MIRANDA: Don’t say that, it’s Amir’s first, after all. IRVING: But it’s not like we’re equipped. We’ve got nothing. No cult, no priesthood. MIRANDA: These are different times. IRVING: Not even a position of political power. Who’s even interested in receiving our message? MIRANDA: I have tons of followers on Instagram. Here, Amir, this is where you’ll be working. They stop outside of 5 King’s Kebab. AMIR: Wow. IRVING: Yeah, wow. No kidding. Irving takes in the graffitied building. 6 MIRANDA: Well well. So I guess none of us were supplied with an optimal human harbor this time around. Amir peeks in. AMIR: But imagine the difference we’ll be able to make. Finally they’ll be able to find out what’s going on. IRVING: I wouldn’t get your hopes up. AMIR: Why not? It went well for the last one, didn’t it? Everyone knows about the oceans rising now. Irving is about to speak, but something blows into his eye. MIRANDA: Come on, let’s go. The sand will be here soon. They move along. AMIR: Does it always feel so, so… Amir looks down at his new physical form. MIRANDA: (Smiling.) Yes. You’ll get used to it. IRVING: Just wait until you stub your toe. 7 WHEN THE SANDSTORM rolled in across Copenhagen it was early yet, and the Copenhageners hadn’t quite woken up. On Vesterbro the first grains of sand landed on a skylight high above Vesterbrogade, above a tidy, sparkling apartment—even rows of books, neatly folded clothes, chair pushed in at the desk, piles of equally spaced papers marked with names, Prometheus, Pandora, Medea. But Alice was tangled in her bed sheets. The grains of sand swished against the window, the mobile phone next to her lit up when a message arrived. Alice groaned as she reached for it, but she didn’t wake up. Her hand fumbled across the empty half of the bed beside her, stopped, and still asleep she curled back up. A new beam of light, new grains of sand against the glass, but she didn’t notice. Not yet. Not far away, among the much larger apartments on Fredericksberg, the first grains of sand landed in the drains and whooshed down the pipes towards the street. The wind found its way in through a half open window, past a blind, and made the papers pinned to the walls inside flutter. Sketches and drawings whispered and waved over a desk. In the double bed across the room Malik lay on his back, snoring and deaf to everything. But his ten-year-old daughter Joanna was woken by the pattering on her bedroom window. She lay there in her silk pajamas listening, waiting for an explanation that didn’t come. The sand pecked more and more persistently against the window and the pale morning light was starting to cast a strange hue. Eventually she crawled out of bed and pressed her nose to the window, trying to see what was there. 8 The wind swept its brown sand clouds across Jagtvej and the Nørrebro roundabout. Up on Nørrebro it blew past a black anarchist flag and in through an open window, where it strewed a few grains of sand on Katja’s bare thighs in someone else’s bed. She glanced at the grains, poking at them with a black-painted nail. She was far too tired to wonder where they’d come from, too tired even to keep herself awake, and yet the guy who was sitting on the windowsill rolling a cigarette kept on talking. “… and I mean, I don’t even think in terms of men or women or whatever, I treat all people equally, but then we were supposed to sit there talking about unconscious bias the whole afternoon, when we could’ve been out putting up stickers or doing anything else, right, so like that’s when they lost me…” Maybe it was just as well she went home. She could catch a few more hours of sleep, and she’d wanted to tackle her essay today. The guy said something about being easily offended and she was overwhelmed by a desire to read about habitat change among small mammals. She glanced at the floor, looking for her clothes, but it felt impolite to take her eyes off him. He gestured with the rolling paper. It didn’t seem like he’d ever finish with that cigarette. “… and that’s what I said: it’s all about perspective, isn’t it, there’s no reason to go around dividing people up on the inside when capitalism is the true enemy here…” Katja fixed her gaze on his lip piercing. It moved back and forth as he spoke. God, she was tired. “… and that’s how we could end fascism, stop wage slavery, put our foot down with these pigs, so they really get it once and for all, are you with me, if only people would stop treating these meetings like some fucking therapy session. Want some?” Katja blinked, loosed her gaze from the piercing, and watched as he reached a cigarette out to her. Oh, cigarettes. She wanted one so bad. “No thank you,” she said. “I’m trying to quit.” She decided the statement might as well be true. The guy shrugged and lit it himself. He drew a breath as if to keep going, but Katja got there first. 9 “I better run.” “Now? Already?” Katja climbed out of bed, grabbed her panties, and searched the floor for her T- shirt. “Yeah. It looks like we’re in for some bad weather.” The wind slammed the open window into the guy’s back as if to prove her point. She put on her pants and found her T-shirt under the bed, brushed some dust off, and pulled it over her head. “It was fun hanging with you,” the guy said. “It’s like you get me.” “For sure. Of course. See ya.” A quick hug by the window, then she was hurrying out through the party’s leftovers, stepping over two punks in the kitchen, dashing down the stairs, sticky with beer, and out onto the street. She was the lone cyclist on Nørrebrogade. Only two sanitation workers were out and about. 10 WHEN MALIK ROLLED the blind up everything was brown. The sun had long since risen, but its rays could barely reach the roofs or in through the apartment windows. He had to turn on the light in the bathroom when he went for a pee, and when he did his morning push-ups in front of the bedroom mirror his face was cast deep in shadow. It wasn’t a bad look, actually. Joanna was already awake, of course. He could hear her clattering on the keyboard before he reached her door. “Have you seen this weather, princess?” he said, leaning against the doorframe. “Shame it’s Saturday, huh? Otherwise school would definitely be canceled.” She looked up from her computer, cracked a smile, managing somehow to still look earnest. “Do you think it will be canceled on Monday?” she asked. “Because that’s when we’ll be getting the myths.” Malik yawned.